Customer centricity in managed services

Abstract

Customers are the core entity in service provision and delivery, and that understanding and addressing their requirements must be the central to operation of organizations. Although the concept of customer centricity has been deep rooted in literature for many years, implementation of the same in organizations seems to be shallow. The recent developments in the world economy has forced many organizations to see if there is any merit in aligning themselves to the customer-centric paradigm, but there are fundamental issues and challenges that serves to deter them. These are mainly related to strategy and structure, processes, reward systems and metrics. To overcome these we attempt to adopt a generic framework reinforced by leadership commitment, systems and processes, and engaged people. In this project we do a study on the published literature that will aid our analysis. Additionally we also gather data from a project of a leading IT firm and analyze the fit with the adopted model, evaluate how processes and systems have evolved over a period of time and identify the scope for improvement. We have created a customer centricity tracker which was developed along with the assistance of the senior management of the organization of study. The tracker is a feedback tracker, where gaps identified in projects relating to customer feedback is entered. The tracker helps to devise a plan to address the issues highlighted by customer additionally value creators for the customer are highlighted. This tracker will be circulated by all project team members with the customer. The customer keeps track of the action provided on the feedback. With each and every action closure, the organization moves closer to the customer and tends to be more customers centric.