Thursday, February 26, 2009

Corporate structure and the customer

I've wrote previously about how your company structure is not necessarily your customer's view of your company, so it comes as no suprise that Steve Hurst, editor at Customer Strategy feels that the silo'd structure of companies are to blame. He's just attended the Technology for Marketing & Advertising show in London and has blogged about:
"..the underlying ‘command and control’ corporate structures that are making it nigh on impossible for organisations to give their customers what they want and when they want it in a consistent manner.... Come on guys this is the 21st century not the 19th."
Strong words?

Well, not really, given that very few companies show a high degree of customer experience maturity, despite customer service making a difference in a recession.

As this economic downturn bites deeper, at what point is it that companies realise that their structure may be the difference between success and failure (and its not the fault of the customer)? Perhaps only the ones that live to tell the tale in the end!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You CRM should be able to give you 20 different views of your customer if need be, as long as you realize that your customer has only one view of you.

Here's an interesting one on silo mentality:
http://www.camagazine.com/index.cfm/ci_id/6798/la_id/1.htm
"Business units that transform themselves into silos, with little interaction with the rest of the organization - and there are many in large companies - should be sold."

That'll teach 'em :-)

Hayden Sutherland said...

Boudewijn, thanks for the link. The interesting thing is that the article isn't a recent one, its from 2002 (Back when you and I used to build £multi-million content management systems).