Enterprise Issues
With Siaka Momoh)
This is a familiar terrain for Patricia B Seybold. Patricia Seybold is the celebrated author of The Customer Revolution, the book that tells you, you are no longer in control of your business, of your company’s destiny and goes on to teach you how to thrive when customers are in control.
The Customer Revolution is a strong message for all who are in business in this age.
At a class session in the Pan African University(now Pan Atlantic University) one the lecturers in an entrepreneurship management class related her experience in her popular neighbourhood shop. A staff at the shop, a supervisor was rude and uncaring to her as a customer. This was a shop where she bought items worth more than N20, 000 every month, so she was not a first time customer. Did it even matter if she was? She took a decision right there – she stopped patronizing the shop. She is a customer, she is in control.
Listen to Patricia Seybold, you will hear the beat of the customer revolution loud and clear. She says executives in a variety of industries have begun to feel the impact of the customer revolution. She offers you their stories:
Arne Frager is the president of The Plant, a professional music recording studio in Sausalito, California. Arne’s been in the music business for 27 years and he’s never seen the flow of new music dry up before.
Arne Frager: “My recording business is off 50 per cent. The whole music recording business is off 50 per cent this year (2000). About half the revenues in our industry come from new acts. But the big record labels are so paralysed by the MP3/Napster/Nutella/Freenet free distribution of digital music that they are not signing any new acts! Without the labels paying for the production of new albums, our studio isn’t recording.”
Customers taking things into their hands have profoundly altered the landscape of the music industry. That is customer revolution for you.
Brennan Mulligan is president of Timbuktu2 designs, a U.S.-based manufacturer of backpacks and messenger bags. His testimony:
“Customers love the ability to custom-design their backpacks. But there is just no way to convince retailers to take custom orders in their stores. They can’t handle one-off products. So we’ll go direct to the customer and do it on the internet. Customers can design their own backpacks, we’ll ship them out the next day, and if the retailers want to participate we’ll set up shop on their web sites and put kiosks in their stores, too!”
Customers want capabilities that retailers haven’t been able to offer. Now manufacturers are responding to customers’ desires. The customer now dictates.
Patricia Seybold calls it sweet surrender. She means the manufacturers who, traditionally, is called the king, has now surrendered to the power of the customer. You may call the manufacturer the king because he makes the product and sets the price which others in the supply and consumption chain must follow, but he must move his stock to survive. And the customer is that person that the stock has to be moved to, it is he that must be ready to consume to make possible successful movement of stock.
So the customer is important.
Seybold tells the company owner, he is no longer in control of his company’s destiny, that his customers are, “thanks to the internet and to mobile wireless devices”, which have allowed customers to be armed with new and more convenient tools with which “to access our businesses as well as those of our competitors around the clock and around the globe”.
