SUMMARY OF VM#1 CUSTOMER FOCUS

Customer focus, as one of the main principles of Total Quality Management seek
to understand the customer wants and needs, in order to figure out the right materials,
people, and processes in place to meet and exceed their expectations. As what it tells,
successful organizations understand what’s relevant to their customers .They
understand their needs and wants. Day by day, customer’s preference changes, they
always seek for new models and quest for updated system and etc. Hence, to sustain
success over time, organizations need to continually monitor changes in their customer
needs and adapt accordingly.

Customer focus businesses seek to balance the commercial realities of their

industry with a constant desire to improve the experience of their customer. They must
balance their financial position; conduct a market analysis while improving their
products and services. In a customer focused perspective, it is not only centred in their
customers who used and purchased their products and services, it also includes
employees, referrers, and ranges of stakeholders’ .Thus, the stakeholders also have a
positive experience, as processes and systems meet their needs.

A customer focused organization, composed of four elements. The first one is

strategy, vision and brand. In an organization, they must adapt new strategies while
improving their brand and that must always connected with their vision. The second one
is leadership. The way leaders speak and behave says a lot about an organization in
customer focused organizations; leaders should actively demonstrate their commitment
to customers on a day-to-day basis such as making a habit of sharing customer stories
and their systems and processes are designed to deliver on customer commitment. The
third one is the customer experience; it is a key indicator of customer focus businesses.
Customer focused organizations involve and engaged the customer in the design of
their products and services. They seek to develop a deep understanding of the
customer’s unique needs. They critically evaluate the experiences they’re offering and
seek to improve and they constantly seek and share feedback. Lastly, employee
engagement, in order to deliver a great customer experience employees must be on
board. Customer-focused organization actively encourage all their people to engage
with the customer .They recognize and reward their employees for their demonstrated
commitment to their customer.

Customers determine the quality of the product and services. Once a product
fulfills a need and lasts as long as or longer than expected, customers know that they
have spent their money on a quality product. To implement this principle, organization’s
objectives must be aligned with customer needs. Research and understand customers’
needs and expectations. Communicate with them, measure satisfaction, and use the
results to find ways to improve processes. Find a balance for satisfying customers and
other interested parties such as owners, employees, suppliers, and investors. Lastly,
manage customer relationships. Therefore, establishing deep understanding of
customers and their perception of value is a prerequisite to deliver commercially
successful products in today's hostile business environment.

WORD COUNT: 492

REFERENCES:

TQM Customer Focus - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOAtLzJtIB8

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3LuHP0SagI

CASE STUDY
 Royal Bank was founded as Merchants Bank in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1864. In
1901, as the business of the bank expanded across the continent, it chose to rename
itself The Royal Bank of Canada. For RBC, the quest for customer focus began when
the company discovered that it knew much less about the needs of its customers than it
thought. RBC is Canada’s largest financial institution, with more than 12 million
personal, business, and public-sector clients and offices in some 30 countries
worldwide. In 1996, like most financial institutions at the time, RBC had been investing
heavily in making banking as convenient as possible, on the assumption that this would
attract new customers and increase loyalty. It extended banking hours. It built new
branches and installed more ATMs. It added online access. It created insurance,
investment, and other new services. But to the company’s surprise, a survey of more
than 2,000 current and potential customers revealed that people didn’t choose a bank
on the basis of how convenient it was. RBC scored very well on that measure. But, as
the survey clearly showed, that was merely table stakes. Instead, what customers
wanted was a bank that demonstrably cared about them, valued their business, and
recognized them as the same individuals no matter what part of the bank they did
business with.

Based on this insight, RBC set a goal to systematically manage all of its
customers at every one of the millions of points at which they came in contact with the
bank—a prospect that was daunting, to say the least. To its credit, over the last nine
years RBC has learned how to reorient the focus of its entire organization away from
products and distribution and toward the real needs of its customers. The results are
telling. Dividends swelled from 68 cents per share (in Canadian dollars) in 1996 to $1.72
per share in 2003, driven by a 20% increase in high-value customers and a 13% rise in
average customer profitability between 1997 and 2001. Between 2000 and 2004, the
percentage of customers that purchased the bank’s high-margin packages of bundled
products and services doubled, from 35% to 70%, and the success rate of sales leads
driven from promotion events rose to 45%. (Compare this against the 2% to 5%
response rate typical of standard marketing programs.) Along the way, RBC has won a
host of information technology awards for its innovative customer-facing computer
systems.
ANALYSIS

Royal Bank [formerly Royal Bank of Canada] at first is low earner bank but when
they began to apply the concept of customer focus they have been recognized by their
millions of customers and gained their loyalty. RB commits to a customer relationship
management (CRM) business strategy that seeks to maximize the value of its customer
base through the strategic use of information. For them, customer focused plays an
important role for the development and success of their business. They provide
customer contact personnel with the information that allows for appropriate decision
making. In this case, the bank seeks to ensure that service decisions are standardized.

Sales and service strategies for individual customers are currently distributed to
desktops in the call centers and branches. It was the manned channels that Royal Bank
first sought to include in its relationship management capability. As a result, the bank is
making strides toward providing individual staff members with the customer knowledge
that enables them to provide a tailored, consistent customer experience irrespective of
points of contact—in effect creating an enterprise wide organizational memory.

Royal Bank demonstrates some of the critical success factors that are often
identified in organizations with well-implemented CRM projects. Aside from a
multidisciplinary approach to CRM, the bank has: visible and vocal support throughout
executive management; a robust data warehousing environment; an evolving corporate
culture that shifts focus from business units to customers, and a willingness to take risks
to improve its CRM capability.
 Given in the exhibit number 1, although customer interaction technologies are
critical to the execution of a CRM business strategy, it is the customer knowledge
capability that enables the creation of customer specific strategies for sales and service.
Simply put, customer knowledge capability drives the CRM business strategy, and the
customer interaction technologies deliver it. It is precisely these capabilities in the lower
sphere, labeled customer knowledge, at which Royal Bank excels.

Within Royal Bank, their goal is to ensure that interactions with customers are
consistent and appropriate across all the delivery channels. Consistency and
appropriateness in customer messages can only be achieved if critical customer
information is widely distributed among all points of customer contact. RBC stored
customer sales and service strategies in a centralized profile repository. While the bank
has pursued technologies that enable CRM through both customer interaction and
customer knowledge, it has made particular strides in the areas of customer knowledge,
decisioning, and the use of advanced analytics. At Royal Bank, gathering and mining
customer data to better understand and serve customers is a critical imperative that is
yielding success. Thus, RB gained customers’ satisfaction along the years.

Some of the core responsibilities, applied by RB in their customer focused

concept were the following (1) customer profitability measurement, (2) customer
decisioning and experiences, (3) segmentation, modeling, and other advanced
analytics, and (4) primary marketing research. The customer experience emphasizes
ensuring the customer interaction is appropriate and consistent for the customer
regardless of the channel being used. Within Royal Bank the imperative to manage the
customer experience is the realization that every interaction can enhance or damage a
relationship.

CONCLUSION

Therefore, the sure foundation of business success needs to build a lasting

customer-focused mind-set. By understanding the concept of customer focus,
managers will be able to anticipate the challenges ahead and invest organizational
resources, including their own time, in those activities that matter most while avoiding
the high-cost, low-return measures that have plagued in so many companies.

WORD COUNT: 986

REFERENCES:

The Quest for Customer Focus. (2014, August 1). Harvard Business Review.
https://hbr.org/2005/04/the-quest-for-customer-focus