Don’t Homogenize, Synchronize

This week’s reading material talks about synchronization in a company to build a better relationship with customer. Synchronization is necessary in a case that a company is distributed in units and products and there is no coordination between them since this situation can lead to several unfavorable results such as high-cost source maintenance, source duplication, tendency to make error, poor customer relationship, etc.

I think, it is common for a company to be divided into certain number of departments units based on its function, product or else, since it has many different things to be taken care off internally and externally. It needs different people with different skills or knowledge to be in charge with those different things in the same time. The problem would appear if they are not well coordinated, as illustrated in the 3M case in this article. 3M could neither identify profitable business opportunities nor recognize its loyal customers who have bought many different products since it does not have an integrated database. 3M’s customers have different experience even though they are dealing with the same company. As a loyal customer who has bought many products or paid company’s services for a certain period of time, I would expect the company to recognize, give better (best) services, or even give rewards to me. I think most customers are like that. So the company would be in danger if it can not deal with such issues because it is not well coordinated.

Sawhney proposes three aspects to be synchronized, i.e. offerings, technology, and organization. Offering synchronization deals with knowing customers’ characteristics and activities; and mapping company’s product and service to suit those character and activities. The difficulty would be in identifying customers’ characters, activities, and objectives. Once the company can do that, it would be able to assemble offerings according to those things.

Technology synchronization is related to separating the control over back-end application and customer-facing application. IT infrastructure such as database, networks, etc are no longer under the control of each divisional unit but integrated, and customer-facing application used by different divisional units access the same integrated database within the same network or channel. The customer-facing applications are also built uniformly in the matter of user interface so customers would have the same experience although they actually communicate with different divisional or product units. The difficulties would be in integrating different technology used by those units, merging the different format of data, and formatting new procedures, policies, securities related to the new integrated IT infrastructure.

The last synchronization is organization synchronization. It is related to the restructuring the organization especially the people within a company. Formerly, the structure focused in product, now it focuses in customers. The product specialists now have the role as support line, providing technical support to the customer specialist sales team. I think it would be the biggest challenge of all synchronizations since it is not easy to change people. The product specialist teams are used to sell products to customers, have sales targets, compete with others, and other business rituals. They are become habits. It is not easy to eliminate the habits. The product specialists could turn out to be frustrated. I think the change must be slowly and gradually. There must be equal and fair rewards for the product specialist even though they are no longer in the front line (they are probably used to have big rewards when they succeed doing business with customers).

Synchronization is important. However, company must take extra care when dealing with changing people. It is a sensitive issue. Well, any comments are welcome…….. as usual…. .