Sometimes it feels as if business would be so much better without customers.

We could go about our internal meetings without problems, set-up strategies that we like and understand, decide where the funds should go… life would be so easy…. No customer, no cry (to paraphrase a famous song).

Of course, that scenario conveniently forgets that it is the customer who pays our bills!

There is no doubt that the customer should be at the center of every business strategy. And yet it often seems as if focusing on them is an afterthought, a single paragraph in a business plan, nothing more. (It's the almost-famous “Them” and “Us” strategy.)

Lets' face it: while the title of this article would make any marketer cringe, it is still common practice to make decisions without the customer in mind… and still be successful.

Thinking about the customer is not a natural function of many businesses—or even marketing, even though the latter's reason for being is its understanding of the customer. After all, isn't marketers' favorite discussion about how well they understand the customer, often better than anyone else in the company?

Unfortunately, even that is eroding. In today's fragmented business place, customer interaction and customer treatment could easily be managed by a branch manager, a Web site, a call system, a customer relationship manager or a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. If you add a touch of business analytics, you will soon realize that many marketers already have little impact on customers.

Remember the 4 Ps?

There was a time when marketing was defined by the 4Ps (Price, Place, Product and Promotion). In Asia, for example, very few marketers really manage them all, as they are either decided at headquarters or by someone with no direct marketing responsibility.

The complexity of delivery, the complexity of promoting to the right people, the complexity of business in general… have shown over and over again that businesses that strive have an understanding of their customer base that goes beyond products and demographics, beyond the marketing department.

Interestingly, most of us, as consumers, have experienced and felt that many companies simply do not take care of us. And yet this is a learning point that we seldom take back to our business in order to improve it.

There is an old proverb that states, “If you cannot smile, do not open a shop.” This simple admonition should be enough to decide whether you have what it takes to take care of customers—day-in, day-out. After all, customers are getting more and more sophisticated, more and more aware and more and more involved with the brand they choose (and therefore less and less involved with the brand they do not chose).

I will now focus on the reason for taking care, or not taking care, of your customers, based on three major business actors: the customer, the marketer and the business owner. There are, of course, many other stakeholders I could explore, but these three drive the business.

The Case of the ‘Sophisticated' Customer

“We all are customers” should be the new mantra. But are we all good customers?

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Frederic Moraillon (frederic.moraillon@sas.com) heads SAS Customer Intelligence in Singapore, where he focuses on helping organizations develop their customer intelligence strategies to increase revenue.