Augmented Customer Strategy

16Organizing the Augmented Customer Relationship

16.1. Introduction

Implementing an augmented customer strategy and the organization that goes with it is necessarily a source of paradoxical tensions at multiple levels: control versus collaboration, a collective versus individual approach, seeking efficiency versus flexibility, exploring versus exploiting, favoring profits versus responsible behavior, etc. [SMI 11]. These paradoxical tensions reflect the simultaneous presence of related but contradictory elements that need to be best articulated. They are all the more marked as the business environment becomes more global, more competitive, has faster changes and internal processes in more complex organizations [LEW 00]. The digitization of the economy, and therefore of organizations, is both a cause and a consequence of these developments, requiring a rethinking of customer strategy in the face of new technological, social and environmental challenges (Chapter 1). This is true for a wide range of organizations, large companies, mid-cap companies and SMEs, but also non-market organizations such as NGOs, local authorities, etc.

At the level of customer strategy, these paradoxes are manifested on many levels, resulting from the necessary transformation of the organization brought about by the advent of digital technology and simultaneously reinforcing this need for digital transformation.

To identify only some of these paradoxes, the previous chapters have shown that with the ...