Customer Oriented Leadership

Two decades ago, Account Management and Client Management were phrases that belonged to fields of advertisement and other services. But today every organization that is a product leader in its category has embraced these worlds but with new meaning altogether. What makes organizations leaders is not only the product and pricing but the value that comes along with the product. If you are a management student, then you will gain a lot by analyzing and understanding how organizations have endeared themselves to the customer and his business and how they manage to deliver superior service in the form of solutions, thus win over customer loyalty.

If IBM has become a world leader and continues to be amongst the top technology organizations, the credit goes to its CEO Mr. Thomas Watson, who build an extraordinary and brilliant sales force that is trained to go into the depth of understanding the customer’s business, in being able to identify the client’s problems and design solutions that address the problems. He followed a decentralized Organization structure that was best suited to bring empowerment and the ability to think and identify with the clients at all levels.

Dozens of specialized service and product groups are always available to get into working with a prospective client’s processes and design new approaches to business processes and applications.

Implementation of solutions was meticulously designed and delivered by teams of experts while facilitated and owned by Account Management teams. IBM today not only provides total solution in terms of design and implementation to its clients, but has extended the scope of its service to managing some of the processes and services at the client’s site too. This aspect of managing the critical processes and providing the site support to the customer at his premise has made it the global leader in technology solutions front.

Whenever banks, credit card companies, airlines or hospitals think of systems and technology, they feel confident of talking to IBM which simply takes over their problems and manages it for them, thus leaving the clients free to manage their business which they are good at. No doubt, the super computers at banks or the systems at Hospitals are the most critical and core infrastructure and no business can afford any kind of disruption in these areas, this factor of criticality and the need to have the core systems and infrastructure up and running calls for special expertise and focus. Who better than IBM who can take over and manage this important task on behalf of the client. This then becomes a win win situation for both the client as well as IBM.

Companies that are customer driven and those that excel in delivering superior value to their customers are always focused on learning and understanding all about their customer’s business and designing solutions that help the customer’s perform better. These companies not only deliver solutions and manage some of the services at client site, but they engaged and spend a lot of time as well as resources in training and educating the customer’s staff as well as the management, in handholding during and after implementation of the projects. In doing so, they offer customized product or solution design as well as a broad range of services that suit different industries.

Today this concept of providing solution to the customers has been picked up and practiced by every industry. Insurance companies talk to customers about life cycle and retirement planning while selling their policies and wealth management companies help you plan for the important events and duties of your life be it your child’s education or buying a home while working out the best possible investment solution.

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