Organization Assessment Category IV - Organization Customer-Centric

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Introduction

MBNQA Customer category is to evaluate how the organization engages customers for long-term success: 1) Customer listening criteria evaluates how the organization’s procedure is designed to listen to customers to decide customer group and market segment, and also on how to capture useful information. 2) Customer engagement criteria evaluate the procedure how the organization builds the relationship with customers, to assist customers, and to collect & process meaningful customer voices, 3) if efforts are effective in building a customer-focused organizational culture and can improve customer loyalty. (NIST, 2019)

This research is intended to assess the customer engagement process of the Ten Thousand Villages (TTV) according to MBNQA’s standard of customer engagement excellence and to propose possible improvements.

Customer Listening Assessment

The voices from customers include customers’ experiences, customers’ own accommodating solutions, and customers’ complaints as the basis for customer metrics to achieve above average profitability through increasing profitable customers’ satisfaction, retention, and loyalty, and to build a strong customer-focused organization.

Best (2013) defined a strong customer-focused organization as stay in close contact with customers for the purpose to deliver high-quality customer satisfaction and to build strong customer loyalty. The characteristics of a customer-focused organization are:
  • If the marketing strategy is centered on meeting customer needs to achieve a high level of satisfaction.
  • How well to understand key competitors and evolving competitive forces to improve relative advantages in pricing, product performance, service quality, etc.?
MBNQA customer listening attributes include customer listening strategy, the effectiveness of the in-use listening modes, obtainable of actionable information, and the knowledge of customer and market obtained.

Ten Thousand Villages has the mission to thrive community and better artisans’ life through marketing artisans’ products, which identified its two customers as artisans and customers of artisans’ products. In his 2018 interview with MOSAIC, CEO Lundblad also has stressed his strategic concerns on how to increase purchasing from its artisans, and on improving sales of artisans’ products, which centered both products-customers and artisan-customers of the Ten Thousand Villages.

Field Analysis & Conclusion

In-use mode to listen to its customers: On its website, Ten Thousand Villages has no mechanism to involve its product customers nor its artisans as its organizational community to listen to their needs or desires which indicates that Ten Thousand Villages lacks channels to listen to its product customers, as well as its artisan groups, which further impact Ten Thousand Villages on if it can obtain actionable information or knowledge about its customers and market segments.

Customer Engagement Assessment

Customer satisfaction rating is a key market performance metrics to forecast future revenues and profits which forward measures how customers will respond to the organization in the future.

Best (2013) explained 1) how de-average customer satisfaction relates to the organization’s profitability, that highly satisfied customers generate higher percent margin on total sales while less-satisfied customers often buy low margin or promotional products; 2) how customer retention relates to profitability, that customer-retaining cost is lower than customer-replacing costs, higher customer retention is longer customer life expectancy and higher lifetime customer value; 3) how customer loyalty relates to an organization’s profitability, that higher customer loyalty score generates higher customer lifetime value.

Attributes to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty are: customer history, purchase amount, desire to repurchase, product preference, and would recommend. For the purpose to encourage to build a customer-focused organization and promote customer loyalty, MBNQA measure customer engagement focuses on organization’s process for building the relationship with customers, how to listen, how to evaluate customer satisfaction and loyalty, how to use data collected from customer voiced.

From its social media, Ten Thousand Villages' efforts on building customer relationships are: 1) build its relationship with its product-customers through sharing stories and sharing values, sharing cultures. 2) build its relationship with its artisan-customers through thriving communities and help families.

Field Analysis & Conclusion

As a non-profit organization, Ten thousand Villages evaluates its artisan-customers’ satisfaction through evaluating how much it bought from its artisan-customers and how many families it helped in the process, but Ten Thousand Villages, which is also a commercial market merchandiser, lacks mechanisms to measure artisans’ professional satisfaction as craftsman, and mechanisms to measure its product-customers satisfaction beyond charity-helpful satisfaction.

Conclusion -- Organization Customer-Centric

From published online secondary data documents about Ten Thousand Villages, this report’s author analyzed Ten Thousand Villages on the field of customers and market-centricity according to MBNQA award and found, as a non-profit organization, Ten Thousand Villages is strong in building relationships and people-developing but lack of measuring mechanism for customer satisfaction.

Ten Thousand Villages has a mission to help artisan succeed through fair trading in the commercial market, but its process of listening to customers and engaging customers is not market-centric and artisan professional developing-centric, so that it missed its mission’s people-developing objective of helping its artisan customers’ to succeed on satisfying their own professional satisfaction as craftsmen, and it missed its mission’s commercial objective of fair trading to satisfy its product-customers satisfaction beyond charity helpful.

SWOT Analysis
Strength:
  • Great people-developing focused strategy for its artisan-customer.
  • Strong relationship building skills.
Weakness:
  • Lack of Customer-listening mode
  • Lack of measuring mechanism of customer satisfaction for both artisan-client and product-client.
Opportunities:
  • Strong artisan participation
  • A non-profit organization with a history and an existing community in people-developing for its artisan-customers.
Proposed Action:
  • Promote periodic product-customer survey for its marketable catalog: what should be its products, price range expectation, and quality expectation for design and manufacturing, etc.
  • Conduct periodic artisan-customer surveys for their individual short-term professional expectation and specific help that might be needed.

 References:

Fang, M (2018) Committed to Leadership. MBA513 Final Project (PPT), attached.
MOSAIC (2017) A Conversation with our CEO. Retrieved from
https://www.tenthousandvillages.com/mosaic/ceo-ten-thousand-villages/
Best (2013) Market-Based Management: Strategies for Growing Customer Value and Profitability (6th edition). Pearson Publishing

NIST (2019) Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence Categories and Items. Baldrige Criteria Commentary. Retrieved from https://www.nist.gov/baldrige/baldrige-criteria-commentary

----Feb. 2019

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