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Jay R. Galbraith. Designing the Customer-Centric Organization: A Guide to Strategy, Structure and Process. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005, 184 pages, $39.00 hardcover.
The commercial transaction seems simple enough. Seller has product, wants money. Customer has money, wants product. But it turns out that complications abound. For one thing, all customers are not created equal. Some yield more profit, some offer more loyalty, some are less demanding, some are more open to expanded offerings. There are, says Jay Galbraith in this book, two main types of selling organizations: "A product-centric company tries to find as many uses and customers as possible for its product. In contrast, a customer-centric company tries to find as many products as possible for its customer, and it has to integrate those products." The purpose of this book is "to articulate what it means to be customer-centric and to illustrate how to organize accordingly."
Galbraith suggests that each organization must decide how customer-centric to be, if at all. If you have only stand-alone products to sell and you don't see any way to bundle any of them with something else to produce an attractive "solution" for one or more of your profitable customers, then there's no point in going customer-centric. How far should a company go in the direction of customer-centricity? The larger and more expansive the bundle or "solution" you can propose and the more "integrated" or glued together the elements of your solution, the more customer-centric you can and should be, or so says the author. Each solution, of course, is likely to be applicable for only one customer or a small group of similar customers. It would seem to follow that some other customers have to be neglected (unless your sales resources are unusually...