As a company’s dominant logic, customer centricity is gaining ever more popularity. It is surprising, then, that only very few measurement models exist for measuring the perception of customer centricity from the customers’ perspective. For analysing customer centricity, however, constant feedback from customers is needed, so that the right levers can be addressed.
In the book Kundenorientierung, the existing approaches and measurement models on this topic are discussed comprehensively. The Customer Centricity Canvas also helps those responsible to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their own company’s customer centricity.
Kassemeier et al. have likewise engaged with the topic of customer centricity. They come to the conclusion that analysing customer centricity should comprise the perception of the company but also the perception of the behaviour of customer-contact employees. The behaviour of customer-contact employees is based on customer-centric commitment (customer-centric attitude) and is called customer-centric citizenship behaviour . It should be taken into account that the behaviour of customer-contact employees can be strongly shaped not only by their attitude but also by the behaviour of colleagues without customer contact. Kassemeier et al. can show that, for analysing the strength of customer centricity from the customers’ perspective, the company and the customer-contact employees are to be taken into account as two independent dimensions. In addition, their study confirms once more that customer centricity has a great influence on a company’s growth and profit development.
Their explanations also make clear, however, that previous work has given far too little thought to transforming the organisation, and that customer centricity is wrongly equated with customer experience management or CRM. In their explanations, they shorten customer centricity to structure and information technologies. So it turns out that, although customer centricity is on everyone’s lips and awareness is growing that analysing customer centricity is an important success factor, the respective measurement models lack conceptual depth. Above all, the understanding regarding the organisational preconditions does not seem sufficient.
The following article helps to gain an overview of previous research efforts on the topic of customer centricity and clearly shows that we are still at the beginning of precisely understanding this construct and the effect relationships.
