Stage-4: The Reciprocity Mode
Injunction: Give good value!
Businesses must activate the Community-centred mode, which urges reciprocity. In the commercial context, that means offering value-for-money. Ideally, the purchasing community will think what they obtain is «cheap at double the price».
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Businesses must self-consciously restrain urges to exploit or cheat customers, but rather seek ways and means to generate mutual advantage. This is the stage at which customers are won over.
Success depends on:
- Regarding products as services.
- Seeing the customer’s point of view.
- Meeting customer needs.
- Taking customer preferences seriously.
- Getting all staff involved in serving the customer.
- Dealing fairly at all times.
- Gaining consensus with partners on ways to improve service.
- Supporting industry-wide bodies to initiate and maintain standards.
Community-centredness is an inclusive approach. It assumes that customers will be best served if:
► Employees are well-treated.
► Suppliers provide quality reliably.
► Shareholders stick with their investment.
► The community is supportive; & so on.
This way of thinking turns employees, shareholders, suppliers, creditors, customers, the wider community and government into serious stakeholders in the business because:
► All contribute to or affect profitability.
► All benefit from the company’s success.
Principles like fairness, consensus and reciprocity also help ensure that incentives to stakeholders, especially senior management, do not operate perversely. So the company now re-enters the quadrant naturally, and with an informal «license to operate in society».
Is product-centric? or market-centric? Or both?
Developmental Stimulus
Given a base of customer support, a desire to retain customers grows as the natural way to ensure that support for the firm is safe against erosion by time or competitors.
«Customer Retention» is a meaningless aspiration if a commitment to providing «Value-for-Money» is absent or weak. The difficulty is that this new aspiration requires a readiness to put customer relationships before the business itself. That is unmistakably a kinship-centred type of demand.
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Proceed to Stage-5: The Surrender Mode.
Originally posted: July 2009