Essay on "Holistic Relationship Marketing"

Essay 10 pages (3594 words) Sources: 7

[EXCERPT] . . . .

In doing and creating all these systems to better support customer relations and external relationship marketing these same businesses began to notice a missing link in the process, which was that employees who were not happy and invested found it far more difficult than those who were to be positive in every customer relations encounter. From this recognition came a new urgency of customer relations quality development and also a new demand for relationship marketing that turned inward to build employee and even supplier relationships to greater levels, hence internal RM (Lee & Trim, 2007; Herington, Johnson & Scott, 2006, p. 364).

Relationship Marketing Internal

The natural outgrowth of this new recognition that relationships are important for external (customer) based RM and internal (employee/supplier) RM came an new emphasis on quality customer interactions that has clearly changed the face of business especially in the service sector in the last 30 years but also toward a new emphasis on employee retention and more importantly employee satisfaction. Businesses of varied types can and do often, now more than ever rely more on strategic plans to support internal RM, by building team and corporate cultures on every level of the business. Some are successful and gain outstanding recognition for being among a top few of places voted the best to work while others struggle daily to uphold both internal and external RM strategies (Herington, Johnson & Scott, 2006). To provide an example some companies have even begun to stress internal RM to such a degree that they publically recognize internal RM as they singular key to business success. These companies focus on internal RM over almost everything else and claim it is their holy grail because when their employees are happy their customers are happy. (Herington, Johnson & Scott, 2006, pp. 364-365) Herington, Johnson & Scott,( 2006) provided several examples of such firms and stress that these firms indicate that, across the board, the biggest and most effective change made that has improved productivity, growth and profitability is internal RM. These firm executives stress that happy employees make happy customers, reflecting their own feelings and belief in the firm out into the market to serve as the standard bearer for customer retention in nearly every encounter, of which there are millions a year. Firms use team building, personal focus and even many terms that are often associated with family rather than business to build the positive aspects of the internal corporate climate as well as strong and transparent pay and benefits packages that have been shown to be effective motivators for positive corporate opinions among employees (Herington, Johnson & Scott, 2006; Shore, Tashchian & Jourdan, 2006) all of which serve to build the customer focus and relationship by proxy through employee satisfaction.

Holistic Relationship Marketing

Having discussed the evolution of RM theory and application the goal now is to stress the essential nature of marrying the internal and external RM models to one another in a holistic manner. With the recognition of a customer focused and an employee satisfaction focused relationship many firms will find greater success in the modern business climate. It goes without saying that as businesses grow they must pay more and more attention to those things which serve as the core of relationships, from an external perspective though it may seem important for the customer to see the firm as large and strong therefore reliable and capable it is also important that customers feel as if the personal is still the driving factor in customer interactions and one of the best ways to do this is to create a team or even "family" like corporate climate, where the employees reflect their truthful desire to include customers in the positive corporate climate by providing firm services to them in a positive manner (Ballantyne, 1997; 2000; Herington, Johnson & Scott, 2006). According to an article in Malaysian Business the nature of service industry business is often based on millions of very brief customer encounters and each one is a point of creation for the company and determines the company's success or failure. ("Moments of Truth," 1999, p.37)

Market and Firm History and Background

To demonstrate the positive development of holistic RM one must look to a firm type that has the most to gain and lose from employing or not employing holistic RM. The type of firm analyzed here will therefore be one that has a very large customer base as well as huge numbers of employees. This combination demonstrates an area in business where service delivery is likely to occur at multiple access points and those who deliver service must utilize all their fundamental strategies to make each delivery of service as positive as possible to demonstrate greater brand and customer loyalty in the market. For this purpose the type of firm will be in retail service, where customer loyalty and frustrating levels of employee anonymity is often seen, i.e. A returning customer encounters a different employee nearly every time he or she accesses service and there are millions of accesses to service on an annual basis (Herington, Johnson & Scott, 2006). Therefore this work will analyze a retail department store firm. The competitive market in the department store industry is astronomical as the products provided vary a great deal and each and every customer is essential to business success as profit margins are often very low and are seemingly in constant decline as product prices and competition between firms is extremely high. That being said, in a traditional chain department store employee turnover is also often exceedingly high as pay-scale, opportunities for advancement and other issues are often a challenge to retention and recruitment. The market demands certain parameters that do not offer a great deal of variation in wages and the services provided by employees are not usually advanced services, so the level of their work demonstrates their expendability and it is much harder to make them feel valued. Therefore the need for holistic RM is essential to ensuring a competitive advantage and customer loyalty and many tools must be used to do so. Having experienced a frustrating level of employee turnover as well as many customer complaints regarding customer encounters the store a chain with 12 large regional outlets decided to refocus its efforts on employee satisfaction as a factor for better customer service delivery.

Historical Mission

The previous mission statement "To provide the customer the highest quality products for the best value" seemed to underplay the importance of the employee in the link and many years of frustratingly trying to develop massive customer service initiatives in a forever ebbing and flowing workforce proved relentless.

Implementation of Holistic RM

The new mission statement "Our team of employees will strive to provide the customer the highest quality products for the best value," is inclusive of the employee culture and only a reflection of a broader attempt to redouble corporate efforts to be inclusive of the employees in nearly every aspect of the retail market business. The company set about to retain employees by revamping its pay practices to exceed industry standards, improve its compensation packages and offer them to more employees and to build a foundational employee-employee interaction process that involved stressing to employees at every level the importance of serving the customer as well as each other with kindness. The company also reduced mandates, increased group decision making for change processes and began to sponsor employee community building activities including sponsorship of local sports teams that the employees wished to participate in, biannual company meet and greet picnics and other social events where employees were encouraged to bring families and build rapport with one another at all levels from the CEO to stocking and inventory staff (Barry & Weinstein, 2009; Juscius & Grigaite, 2010).

Firm Outcomes Analysis

These relatively low cost changes completely transformed the firm reducing employee attrition by 56%, increasing customer satisfaction (as evidenced by reduced number of complaints) and increased customer repeat business (as evidenced by extensive survey work). The firm expects to report profit margin increases of more than 12% in the next quarter and 18% in the fiscal year a staggering success in a very competitive industry. If the firm continues to build on internal RM stressing its importance and link external marketing by continuing to meet and exceed industry pay and benefits standards (Hadjikhani, Lindh & Thilenius, 2012) continuing to internal relationship building (Durkin, & Bennett, 1996; Ballantyne, 1996; 2000; Lee & Trim, 2006), creating networks and opportunities for employees to create better customer encounters ("Moments of Truth," 1999) as well as novel industry approaches to internal and external monitoring of success and weakness to make the transition a continual growth process.

Discussion of Outcomes

The restructuring of this business is a singular example of the transformative power of reinventing a customer service focus to one that links the importance of that focus to those who actually provide… READ MORE

How to Reference "Holistic Relationship Marketing" Essay in a Bibliography

Related Essays:

Marketing the Competing Concepts Under Which Organizations Term Paper

Marketing

The competing concepts under which organizations have conducted marketing activities include: the production concept, product concept, selling concept, marketing concept, and holistic marketing concept. Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages… read more

Term Paper 7 pages (2331 words) Sources: 5 Style: APA Topic: Advertising / Marketing / Sales

---

Marketing-- Specified Marketing Is the Procedure Essay

Marketing-- Specified

Marketing is the procedure of connecting the worth of a service or product to consumers. Marketing may in some cases be translated as the art of selling items,… read more

Essay 2 pages (716 words) Sources: 2 Topic: Advertising / Marketing / Sales

---

Marketing Organic Chocolate Bars the Selected New Thesis

Marketing Organic Chocolate Bars

The selected new product for development is a line of organic chocolate candy bars which will be branded under the name Everyday. The organic chocolate market… read more

Thesis 3 pages (870 words) Sources: 5 Style: APA Topic: Advertising / Marketing / Sales

---

Marketing: Digital Tools and Technology Evidence-Based Research Essay

Marketing: Digital Tools and Technology

Evidence-based research suggests that companies who integrate their online and offline services are much more likely to benefit from marketing by utilizing an entire spectrum… read more

Essay 8 pages (2593 words) Sources: 10 Style: Harvard Topic: Business / Corporations / E-commerce

---

Green Marketing Term Paper

Green Marketing

Over the last decade or so the word "green" has taken on meanings far beyond the color of green. Indeed, in response to the urgent issues of climate… read more

Term Paper 11 pages (3752 words) Sources: 1+ Topic: Energy / Power

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>