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Organizing and Managing the Profitable Customer-Strategy Enterprise: Part 2
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
—P. B. Medawar
It should go without saying that an enterprise will not simply be able to paste a customer-management organizational structure atop its existing organization. Moreover, the change, in terms of success metrics, management roles, and responsibilities, and the required capabilities of the enterprise, are profound. In truth, the transition never actually ends, because there will always be additional steps the enterprise can take to improve its relationships with its customers. Nevertheless, when starting as a well-oiled, product-marketing organization, taking the first tentative steps toward customer management requires a good deal of planning. In this chapter, we address the evolutionary reality of organizational change as well as practical guidelines for each department during the transition.
During the transition to a customer-centric model, enterprises frequently underestimate the degree to which all facets of the business will be affected by the changes and the ongoing efforts that will be required to achieve full business benefits. The organizational and cultural transition to customer management represents a genuine revolution for the enterprise, but it is more likely to be successful when it can be treated as an evolution within the organization. Here we discuss three ways to speed this evolution ...
