Peer Review

Customer Centric Strategy

Material Detail page

Reviewed:: Dec 20, 2021 by Business

Bookmark

Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

Customer centricity is about organizational transformation making the customer the focus for business decisions, processes, product development, services, and procedures. Some companies purport to be customer centric but they fall short in connecting this concept throughout all functional areas of the business. While it is important to offer superb customer service, being customer-centric is far more than that. It's about mapping the customer journey to discover customer needs and wants, what's working and what is not, then taking action to improve the customer experience. Customer loyalty is built through providing exceptional customer experiences. This in turn increases revenues through positive company image, referrals, and increased customer lifetime value. Most organizations today realize that they must focus on the customer to remain competitive.

It is an open-source textbook (eight chapters) from eCampus Ontario, Canada, with short embedded videos, on being a customer-centric company. The videos are short and insightful. PowerPoint slides are provided too for the eight chapters.

Type of Material:

Open (Access) Textbook

Recommended Uses:

Slides for the eight chapters are provided. They are professionally done with a consistent design, although too many words. For many, the words extend beyond the page. The instructor could use these during class.

The material could be used for supplemental readings. At the chapter’s end, there are questions to consider. These could be used to generate classroom dialogue. Also, end-of-chapter exercises are provided. These are easy to employ and can be expanded upon in the classroom. Finally, there are simple quizzes. After taking it, answers are provided, or you can retake it.

Technical Requirements:

The ebook is available on the Internet and can be viewed through Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and other web browser platforms. Android was not tested.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

get familiar with customer service terminology,
understand operational goals, quality metrics,
learn the technology used at service centers.

Target Student Population:

The ebook targets any business level course at Community Colleges or four year Universities. Business organizations can also read it to improve customer relationships and loyalty.

Ot could be a supplemental text for a retailing class (undergraduate upper-level).

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Principles of Marketing class

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

The material is comprehensive
Offers many valuable suggestions.
The ebook has plenty of best practices and realistic examples to value customer interactions and establish relationships not just increase profit.
The ebook is formatted similar to an academic textbook, creating takeaways and topic sequence and coherence.
(Note: I read the first four chapters and skimmed the others.)

Concerns:

Technology is an integral part of improving the customer experience, yet, it is mostly relegated to the end of chapter one (Increased Use of Technology). Statistics for online purchases is from 2018. There is little discussion of monitoring social media using software such as Sprout Social. Social listening is discussed in Chapter 4, but it is very brief. You want to measure customer sentiment through social media, conversions on your website, bounce rates, pageviews, etc.

The same is true about onboarding through email (Chapter 4). How do you improve the customer experience on a website (Hotjar for heatmaps and Google Analytics for navigating the site)? It discusses telecommuting from the pre-Covid perspective. How do you manage a remote workforce through Zoom? Under telecommuting, it discusses CRM software. CRM should be detailed throughout the textbook.

The text focused on the traditional customer experience. The chapter include: customer service representative, managing a customer service team, contact center, etc. It is focused mainly on telephone interaction between the company and the customer.

The chapter talks about telling a friend about the poor experience with a friend. This occurs, but reviews online are more impactful (e.g., social media, review sites, etc.).

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

Comprehensive for its focus
Short chapters and embedded videos
Quizzes
All chapters have PowerPoints, graphics, links to outside reading, and videos.
The end-of-chapter and self-check exercises can be used to measure learning outcomes.

Concerns:

Students have a richer learning experience if an ebook presents materials in logical chapters’ sequence.
Course or company training could also use only selected chapters.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

Can be read online or download in various formats.

Concerns:

The site does not have usability features to review content for accessibility and compliance. There are tools within Microsoft Office or other freeware to review for accessibility for the author or web master to perform.

Other Issues and Comments:: The ebook could be integrated on online databases like EBSCOHost or books 24/7 to reach a broader audience.
Creative Commons: