It is common that some organizations sell a wide variety of goods or services that appeal to different groups of customers, each of which has distinguished needs.
Customer
Departmentation
It is common that some
organizations sell a wide variety of goods or services that appeal to different
groups of customers, each of which has distinguished needs. Each customer group
may have to be addressed differently. In such a case, departments may be
created around customer groups. For instance, commercial banks organize their
activities around customer groups to cater to their specific needs. As such, we
find separate departments or divisions for agricultural, industrial and
merchant banking operations. Similarly, we find an air-conditioning company
like Blue Star organizing its business around domestic and industrial
air-conditioning units.
Advantages:
-- Customer departmentation facilitates
concentration on customer needs. This is in line with the customer orientation
professed by many organizations these days;
-- Customers feel that they have an
understanding supplier. For example, the manufacturer may sell to wholesalers
and industrial buyers. Wholesaler requires a product of dependable quality with
assured supplies. The industrial buyer wants products of high quality plus a
service that includes installation and repair of the product and specific
training of the company’s employees; and
-- Helps the organization to get the correct
feel of the market dynamics in terms of preferences of the customers, degree of
competition, competitors’ strategies, etc.
Disadvantages:
-- Difficult to coordinate operations between
competing customer demands;
-- Requires considerable expertise on the part
of managers in understanding customers’ problems and specific needs; and
-- There is a possibility of under utilization
of facilities and employees specialized in terms of customer groups. Small
organizations particularly cannot afford the expenditure involved because some
amount of duplication of the facilities is inevitable.
Tags : Management Concepts & Organisational Behaviour - Organisation Structure And Design
Last 30 days 3047 views