Overview

Chapter Objectives

• Are customers important?

Customers are our most important asset. They are the life-blood of our business and their satisfaction is the ultimate objective of all we do.

Without customers we could not exist.

The majority of organizations these days recognize that without satisfied customers they would not exist. Many organizations, particularly those in the retail sector, are continually looking at different ways of both anticipating and satisfying the needs of their customers. As we have shown in other sections of this book this encompasses areas such as total quality, the supply chain, stock control.

However, as we all know customers can be extremely demanding, unreasonable and fickle!

Being able to meet those unreasonable demands, retaining customers and having customer satisfaction as a principal objective, differentiates those organizations that will survive and thrive from those that fail.

Many writers suggest that the key to achieving this is managing the business from the perspective of satisfying the customer rather than focusing on the product or service.

Starting with customer wants and needs ... enables the organization to develop appropriate products and services for which there is a requirement.
Proctor (1996)

The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.
Levitt (1983)

Attracting new customers costs an organization eight times as much as it does to keep an existing one so it makes business sense to develop a customer-oriented organization.

However, ensuring that customer focus is part of an organization's culture requires time and effort invested to...