Executive Interviews: Interview with Subir Ghosh on Customer-centric Organizations
December 2010 - By Dr. Nagendra V Chowdary

Subir Ghosh
Subir Ghosh

(hands and legs). How can companies manage customers' experience spanning all these five sensory perceptions?
Well, the ways the senses work is that they enable creation and retrieval of favorable memories by providing cues to facilitate this process, for example, the smell of lime allows people to recall pleasant association quickly. The five senses are thus extremely crucial to not only drive brand choice but also in creation of favaorable memories as people like to recall and indulge their favorable experiences as opposed to wanting to forget unpleasant ones.

Thus, an organization must use as many of the five senses as possible in the process of choosing and consumption of its products.

• To manage external customers and give them a memorable and delightful customers the companies need to give their employees (internal customers) a similar experience on a sustained basis so that everyone is charged up and geared up to deliver a unique experience to their respective customers. How do you think companies should go about aligning the internal customers' experience with that of the external customers?
  The most significant thing as I said earlier is the management mindset. The management can view delivering customer experience as a cost, or a necessity as opposed to it being a strategic business differentiator or even the living embodiment of the brand. Depending on the mindset chosen, the entire people and business policies will be diametrically opposite. In the former situation, there will be no investment in training and development of its people, leave alone empowerment to do what is right for the customer and, thus, the business. This will manifest itself in a very hierarchical organization committed to preserve process integrity even when the process is outdated and no more is viewed as relevant to the business. It will always give the benefit of doubt regarding a customer issue to itself and not the customer. Consequently, it will be viewed as a commodity by consumers with little or no repeat business and employees will stay only till the next option comes along. The exact opposite of this will manifest both in terms of employee and customer attitudes towards the firm and its products in the case of management adopting the latter mindset of customer experience being a business differentiator.

• What according to you are customer-centric organizations? Can you give a few illustrative examples of customer-centric organizations across the world? What differentiates these companies from the rest of the companies in their respective industries?
  Customer-centric organizations are the ones that put the customers' interest at the center of all activities that the firm carries out, and believe that they exist only to create and deliver superior value to their customers. Such organizations are characterized by the belief that service is the business and not just a department. They also sincerely believe that they make money by serving customers and don't serve customers to make money. Such a belief is mirrored in the core business principles of these firms and practiced day in and day out.

  Interesting the most successful and admired services sector organizations like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Google, Best Buy, the Marriott Hotel Chain and Singapore Airlines have customer and employee satisfaction as their core business principles.

1. The Multi-Branding Strategy Case Study
2. ICMR Case Collection
3. Case Study Volumes