Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Strategic conversations with your customers helps hone the planning process

Strategic conversations with your customers helps hone the planning process This paper makes the case that customer feedback is a valuable input to a company’s strategy development. The paper also suggests a process for capturing and using this input. By following this process, a company is more likely to identify a strategy in sync with customer and market demands. Closer relationships will also grow between the supplier and customer as a result of the consultative approach to collecting feedback from the customer. The article is based on the author’s experience working with companies to develop fresh information about their businesses before undertaking strategy development. Customers of a company are involved in the market every day and have a different point of view than the company itself. Their observations on issues including new technologies, offerings by competitors, and market demands can help a company prepare for the next threat, or exploit a developing opportunity. The article describes in steps the path to follow if management decides to seek out customers’ views to obtain fresh information for strategic development. By introducing the concept and benefits of strategic customer conversations, and by outlining the steps to take to implement such a system, the reader can now embark on a process of extracting fresh information from customers in order to build or fine‐tune their own strategy. This will help the CEO, VP strategy, head of marketing, or business development head as they plan product, market or service strategies. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Handbook of Business Strategy Emerald Publishing

Strategic conversations with your customers helps hone the planning process

Michael Oleksak
Handbook of Business Strategy , Volume 6 (1): 6 – Dec 1, 2005
Download PDF
6 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/emerald-publishing/strategic-conversations-with-your-customers-helps-hone-the-planning-HZAcluKbpO

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Emerald Publishing
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 Emerald Group Publishing Limited. All rights reserved.
ISSN
1077-5730
DOI
10.1108/08944310510557882
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This paper makes the case that customer feedback is a valuable input to a company’s strategy development. The paper also suggests a process for capturing and using this input. By following this process, a company is more likely to identify a strategy in sync with customer and market demands. Closer relationships will also grow between the supplier and customer as a result of the consultative approach to collecting feedback from the customer. The article is based on the author’s experience working with companies to develop fresh information about their businesses before undertaking strategy development. Customers of a company are involved in the market every day and have a different point of view than the company itself. Their observations on issues including new technologies, offerings by competitors, and market demands can help a company prepare for the next threat, or exploit a developing opportunity. The article describes in steps the path to follow if management decides to seek out customers’ views to obtain fresh information for strategic development. By introducing the concept and benefits of strategic customer conversations, and by outlining the steps to take to implement such a system, the reader can now embark on a process of extracting fresh information from customers in order to build or fine‐tune their own strategy. This will help the CEO, VP strategy, head of marketing, or business development head as they plan product, market or service strategies.

Journal

Handbook of Business Strategy – Emerald Publishing

Published: Dec 1, 2005

Keywords: Customer relations; Communications; Strategic planning; Market research

There are no references for this article.