Customer Experience & Business Organizational Behavior

The era in which customers played an essentially passive role in the consumption of value in the form of business products and services is quickly coming to an end. C.K. Prahalad and Venkatram Ramaswamy (2000) have argued that the new customer is an active player engaged in an explicit dialogue with manufacturers of products and services. Equally significant is the fact that this dialogue, facilitated by the Internet, is no longer controlled exclusively by corporations. In essence, organizational theorists are coming to the conclusion that customers are engaged in fundamentally changing the dynamics of the marketplace and presenting themselves as a new source of competence for the corporation. This concept - that customer experience is both a necessary element in business activity and a vital source of new competencies - reflects the realization that the economics of customer retention and satisfaction are more compelling today than ever before (Jacob, 1994). An evaluation of the posited relationship between customer experience and idealized business or organizational structure, as advanced by Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000), will be offered herein, along with a set of criteria against which such a theory can be assessed.

At issue in the new global economic order, according to Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000), is the notion that successful companies are those which have moved beyond the acceptance

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service requirements, and then translates them into product or service requirement measures. By drawing upon the experience an competence of customers, organizations reduce costs for development, produce goods and services with a ready market, speed up the design and deployment effort, and enhance product or service quality. This, in turn, fosters acquisition of customer loyalty and enhancement of customer satisfaction; personalization of products and services also augments the overall customer experience. The creation of superior customer value is accomplished because of an organization's ability to continually generate intelligence about customers' expressed and latent needs and about how to satisfy those needs. Typically, intelligence generation has been treated as a generic activity of the organization but the new competitive environment necessitates the development of a more customer-focused and interactive intelligence-generation capability (Slater & Narver, 2000). Again, the Internet and other information technologies are ideal vehicles for gathering this kind of intelligence and creating the "customer communities" that Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000) have described. Virtual communities are cost-effective meeting pla
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Approximate Word count = 2908
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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