Cultural aspects of multi chanel cutomer management - Essay Example

Organizations should have a clear picture about the different customer behaviours in order to formulate different strategies to establish strong relationships with them. Some customers may like cheaper price whereas some others may give more importance to the quality of the product or after sales support. The awareness of customer behaviours will help the organizations to formulate different channels for the customer management. This paper is written based on the reflections of the article Cultural Aspects of Multi-Channel Customer Management: A UK Case Study.

Channel management is influenced by customer behaviors, preferences, perceptions and expectations. Customers may contact with the different channels of the organization at different period of time throughout customer’s life cycle. Customer relationship management (CRM) depends of many factor like differences in business practices, competition, regulatory characteristics, country characteristics, and consumer characteristics. Organizations need to approach the CRM in two ways; macro – country level and micro- individual customer in order to cater the needs of the customers effectively.

The macro factors involve differences that affect entire countries or regions whereas the micro factors involve individual consumers within those countries or regions. The success of CRM depends on three factors which arose from internal and external environments; differences in customer expectations, drivers of satisfaction, loyalty, profitability and customer value across countries or cultures; differences in the competitive environments, technological infrastructure, political systems, and regulatory variations between countries around the globe and the difference in the challenges faced by global firms in forming a customer-oriented organization, which already encountered challenges in the form of culture and power issues.

Multi-channel customer management will help us to analyze the influence of culture