“Customer Scenario” – The Vital Scenario to Companies’ Success (A Reflection of Reading Material: Get inside the Lives of Your Customers)

People are different indeed, so are customers. Never treat them the same way as they have different purposes and preferences. Company has to understand how these customers want to be treated in the business or “customer scenario” as named by Seybold. Seybold also gives three examples of how these companies struggle to win their customers by paying great attentions to their “customer scenario” and providing them services and supports even though they are beyond their line of products.

National Semiconductor for instance, it supplies a one-stop on-line design tool, called “Webench”, to its customers (designers). It helps them finish their designing job faster and easier, allows them to run as many real-time simulations as needed until they have come to a final design, and enables them to purchase all the required components not only from National semiconductor, but also other distributors.
It doesn’t stop there. By listening to the need of designers, the system had been developed since then by adding more function, namely “WebTherm” and “Wireless design tools”. National keeps on listening, learning and engaging itself to its customers. Although National has to put much effort, but it gains significantly at the end. There is also one good thing resulted from this. National has built a network with other distributors by enabling the customers buy their product through National’s site. According to Buttle (2004, p.172), the trend of competition is shifting from “head to head between independent companies” to “between networks”. It would be a great future ahead as long as National can manage this network, especially the network position based on their activity links, resource ties and bonds.

Another example is Tesco. Its Tesco Direct, an on-line shopping application, has been claimed as “the world’s largest and profitable internet grocer”. Tesco has reached its success by paying attention to their “customer scenario”. Their customers don’t think that on-line shopping would replace conventional shopping. In response to this, Tesco combine its on-line and off-line promotion. Tesco also does its on-line shopping operation in a different way. While others minimize cost by strengthening their supplies and processes in the main warehouse, Tesco builds its on-line shopping from every store where its customers are used to shop. It doesn’t force its customers to change their habits. It is a good strategy. Since customers might experience a “switching cost of time, money or personal risk” (Zikmund, McLeod, & Gilbert, 2003) in facing a new situation, they might be reluctant to change their habits. More important, customers’ habit is one factor that influences customer loyalty. So Tesco makes it as if customers buy from the usual stores unless now it is online.

The last illustration is Autodesk’s Buzzsaw.com. Buzzsaw.com is an on-line collaborative work space enabling building owners, architects, engineers, other construction professionals, and even banks or financial institutions. Again, it is built as an effort to accommodate customers’ needs. It has reached its success not only because it pays a great attention to “customer scenario” but also enables customers to develop their own scenarios.

Those three examples give a clear model how those companies trying to know who the customers are, what goals they expect to achieve, etc. They do it by developing “customer scenarios”. They learn from the scenarios, revise it, and give more support to the customers. Customers feel that the company knows and understands them better. This situation builds good interaction and relationship between customers and company which eventually will contribute to the customer loyalty. Also from the “customer scenario”, companies are able to give a bundled of product and service that sometimes beyond their own business, and it creates more value to companies and customers. So it can be said that a “customer scenario” is definitely a scenario to companies’ success.

References:

Buttle, F. (2004). Customer Relationship Management: Concepts and Tools. Oxford, UK: Elsevier Butterworth-Heinemann.

Zikmund, W. G., McLeod, R., & Gilbert, F. W. (2003). Customer Relationship Management: Integrating Marketing Strategy and Information Technology. Hoboken, NJ, USA: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.