Building a Customer Focused Strategy: Developing Conceptual Frameworks and Research Propositions

Abstract

In today's highly competitive business environments, organizations tend to become more sensitive and responsive to the changing needs of customers. Inculcating and continually strengthening 'customer focus' is essential for achieving and sustaining competitive advantages for the organizations. The seven Cs framework and research propositions developed in this research is an actionable model for building a customer focused strategy in organizations. With this framework significant steps can be taken to strengthen an organization's customer focus. A strong customer focused strategy exhibits high ratings on all seven Cs: CEO leadership, collaborative approach, compensation system, customer insight, criteria for decisions, competitor awareness and a deep organizational commitment and contribution of all functions to creation of superior customer value, profitably. Research discusses customer focused strategy at Zappos and also provides numerical illustrations to calculate increase in firm valuation for a customer focused organization.