According to Conquering Convergence: Focussing on the Customer, a briefing paper published by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by Oracle (News - Alert), the need to focus on customer preferences is being taken to "a whole new level."

 

The study credited two key developments for what it calls the renewed focus on the customer -- the rise of user-generated content, and the convergence of products, companies and customer groups.

 

Technologies that foster collaboration and sharing of content -- what you've heard referred to as Web 2.0 -- have enabled customers to communicate their views about companies using blogs, home-grown commercials, personal videos and other technologies. "Hence the need for greater customer focus," EIU officials say, since "a single customer can, via the Web, reshape public perceptions about an entire company or product line."

 

Incidentally, there's no better example of the truth of this than the plight of Great Marquee Company, a provider of deluxe outdoor party tents in Auckland, New Zealand, recounted by DataStronghold. Seems on 2006 engaged couple Steve Hausman and Paula Brosnahan decided to decline the company's services in a very polite e-mail.

 

The Great Marquee owner's wife, Katrina Jorgensen, sent them an e-mail saying "Hi Steve. Thanks for your reply. Your wedding sounded cheap, nasty and tacky anyway, so we only ever considered you time wasters. Our marquees are for upper class clients which unfortunately you are not. Why don't you stay within your class levels and buy something from Payless Plastics instead?"

 

The couple forwarded the e-mail exchange to a few friends, who then forwarded it on, and so on, and now you're reading it. Great Marquee’s "cheap, nasty, tacky" email has found its way onto wedding forums, Web rings and chat rooms, and the owner had to fire his wife. That, my friends, is fallout.

 

"Conquering Convergence (News - Alert): Focussing on the Customer" is based on a global survey of 164 senior executives in the information, communications and entertainment industries, and finds that almost all of the IT, telecoms, media and entertainment companies surveyed (92 percent) say they have a strategy for focusing on their customers. Yet fewer than 15 percent rate their strategies as highly successful.

 

As a result, nearly 70 percent of firms plan to do more to focus on the customer in the future.

 

The study also found that direct customer feedback via call centers or the Web is the most popular method of keeping track of customer preferences, cited by 49 percent of respondents. Surveys (41 percent) and focus groups (29 percent) are also popular. But specialist technology is important too, with 43 percent using CRM software and 22 percent using analytics software.

 

Also, nearly half of respondents say they have trouble identifying the best emerging technologies to use in achieving customer-focus goals. "This is a significant problem," the study's authors note, "given that one-quarter of survey respondents feel their firms' current technology is inadequate to the task of staying abreast of changing customer preferences."

 

Regardless of whether firms use technological or non-technological means to track customer preferences, lack of data on customers is the number one obstacle to being client focused (cited by 41 percent of respondents). But almost as significant are issues which are harder to address -- a lack of clarity on what customer data would actually be useful to collect (32 percent), and a sense that customer preferences are too fragmented to track (29 percent).