Retail Dude

Customer Centricity:

As Prateek posted..  “The Power in Hands of Customer”, the term ‘Customer Centricity’ again hit my mind after a long time (it use to hit more frequently during MBA classes ) And so I started thinking how can we be customer centric?? Especially in industry like us it actually holds a value. As we are moving from product-based competition to service-based, entire focus of our processes is toward customers. Customer is King, God, Lord etc. etc. or else customer is everything.

As I kept thinking for long , suddenly first class of service marketing flashed in my mind, where Dr. Kartik Dave (our Service Marketing Faculty) amazed us  by disclosing that there are actually 7P’s in case of Marketing of Services i.e. Product, Price, Place, Promotion (the traditional 4) and People, Process & Physical Evidence (the new 3) (guys trust me you should never miss your MBA classes ). It then took no time for me to realize that Customer Centricity is nothing but aligning these 7P’s with customers need (implied & latent). And technology is the facilitator and enabler in the process . So, very quickly I came up with following diagram:

I guess once we look at this diagram, everything is clear. Still I will like to give some insight,

Product: Customer centric merchandise planning.

Price: Pricing based on customers pocket size and affordability.

Place: Place which is convenient for customer to locate and relate. (Product affinity, aisle affinity, place affinity)

Promotions: Promote what customer need to know. Promote to right customers.

People: Instill the objective of customer service among your people. Hire right people for right position.

Process: Make all the process efficient and flaw less. Be it Billing, Returns, Circulation, Supply Chain etc. etc.

Physical Evidence: Give your customer what you promise to them. Clean Stores, Easy Navigation (no butt-brush), Good Lighting, etc etc.

Technology: Technology is the enabler as well as facilitator of the process. That is why we have applications for merchandise planning, space optimization, pricing, HR management, etc. Using technology makes the process more efficient and objective. Moreover, for global retailers, where they have bulk of work in all these areas, it makes sense to use these applications to pace up as well as make things smooth.

-  Rajeev Damani

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