Customer's advisory, organizational openness and capability: the locus of value creation

• Published in: Eurasian journal of business and economics Vol. 4; no. 7; pp. 81 - 97
• Main Authors: Güngör, M Özgür, Bilgin, F Zeynep
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ala-Too International University 01.05.2011
• Subjects: Communication; Competitiveness; Creativity; Customer Involvement; Customers; Customer’s Advisory; Information dissemination; Information Sharing; Innovation; Openness and Capability; Organizational culture; Relationship Management; Technology Focus; Turkey; Value
• ISSN: 1694-5948; 1694-5972

Organizations of today are aware of the necessity to communicate with customers beyond learning about their satisfaction, loyalty or complaints. The closest way is focusing on customer involvement, a general term used for capturing the responses, advises and ideas of customers in order to better proceed with innovation ideas for product and service development in a competitive market environment. This flow, which is named as `customer's advisory' by the authors, necessitates openness and capability. Openness requires technological focus along with responsiveness and empathy in organizational culture, creating a positive communication environment. The two variables of the capability construct are frequent and bilateral information sharing. This study was conducted to detect the level of use of these two constructs by various organizations operating in Turkey. The aim was to understand the interest in customer involvement to remain competitive, how `customer's advisory' was used to collect customer views and responses in order to nurture creativity in innovation processes. Results reflect that organizations proved to be open; responsive to meet expectations, willing to understand the customers, and reflected empathy to encourage creative ideas. Also both variables of the capability construct proved to be strong where well-educated and trained employees help most for understanding the comments of customers. Turkish organizations' following the customer's advisory with openness and capability brings a new focus into Customer Relationship Management via feeding a creative process leadership focus to remain competitive.