About a month ago, a decision was made to replace the house vacuum cleaner that has been around for more than 12 years and get a new one. After browsing the internet and seeing what the possible options were based on the budget, I visited a known electric appliances retail chain, in order to buy our new electric broom.
The most probable phrase that is likely to come out from a customer’s lips – apart of course from, “You are expensive!” – is “You are all the same!”. History has shown that commoditisation is almost certain for every organisation at a given point in time, for several reasons such as new technologies or oversupply. Apart from these cases though, there are numerous companies that their field of business is actually selling commodities, such as agricultural products like wheat, fruits and cattle, or energy products, namely oil and gas.
In general, people create stereotypes based on a person’s gender, age, nationality, or profession. These are generalised beliefs reflecting the expectation that one might have about the characteristics and the exhibited behaviours of nearly every person of a particular group. As far as salespeople are concerned, among others, they are mostly considered to be extroverted, outgoing and overconfident.
One of the things that I like doing most is to read books, but I must admit that in the past few years I’m mostly into e-books. In my Amazon Kindle virtual library, I have downloaded more than four hundred titles, but I would say that nearly half of them were bought through the personal recommendations that the app has made, based on my previous purchases. This is made possible through an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, which based on the result, has done a pretty good job as far as selling is concerned.
In the previous blog post, we discussed about how customer-centricity is defined, the different perceptions between companies and their customers with regards to it and what are the challenges that the organisations are faced with that prevent them from being customer-centric. The article did close with the question: ““Is there anything that we can do about it?”.
Read more: Customer-Centricity – Easy to Say, Difficult to Implement (Part 2)