Question : what are your suggestions on customer centricity, cost reduction, innovation? Answer: My suggestions for customer centricity, cost reduction, innovation are given below:

Question : what are your suggestions on customer centricity, cost reduction, innovation?

Answer: My suggestions for customer centricity, cost reduction, innovation are given below:

1-  ***Suggestions on customer centricity***:

1. Monitor feedback from your customers and prospects through social media channels
Recognising the value of social media is hugely important and by monitoring the conversations of your customers you can begin to better understand your market. Don’t simply look at common complaints or usual key words but search your customer’s discussion to better understand their current business challenges – consider if there is a way to extend your organisation’s solution or even consider new product streams.

Crucially, it is essential to see social media not solely as a platform for your content but as a two-way conversation. Customers now expect responses via your social channels so ensure that the right colleagues have training on and access to your social media accounts. Everyone from customer services to technical support should be contributing to the conversation.
JetBlue Airways is a great example of how a customer-focused approach to social media can pay off. Solving customer issues, offering flight info and receiving passenger feedback – the business now has over 1.88m followers, all of whom offer data for JetBlue that is a crucial component in better understanding its customer base.

2. Offer clients a collaborative community
Give your clients the opportunity to interact with one another through the creation of a community forum. Using tools such as social media, webinars or even just a hub within your company website, organisations can allow their users to share best practice advice, discuss common difficulties or suggest new uses of their service or product.
The return is manifold: the initial investment will help build trust within your user base while through peer-to-peer interactions within the community you can create new advocates for your brand. Additionally, observing the interactions between customers can help businesses gain an objective view of their offering, ensuring that all sides of the market are being catered for.

3. Would your customers recommend you?
If your customers are no longer reaching out to you then you’re going to have to reach out to them! At regular periods offer the opportunity to participate in customer satisfaction surveys – allowing your client base to give honest feedback – this could be online or in a face-to-face setting to your business’ senior managers. This will provide a distinct interface to reflect on how both customer and provider are performing together. It needs to be structured in a way where both parties can benefit – with clients being given the chance to change areas of the service to better suit their organisation’s needs while businesses can use the interaction to better understand the current and future needs of their customer base.

4. Develop a culture of ‘partnership’ – move the relationship away from being purely contractual
Trust is a vital component in building and maintaining strong customer relationships. Focusing on this trust can help shift your relationship away from being a purely contractual association of necessity and create real partnership which can develop over time.

Demonstrate commitment to your customer’s business objectives and show that your organisation can provide long-term support that will really benefit the client’s business. This can be done through innovation workshops – where both supplier and client work collaboratively together – aimed at specific business challenges such as improving efficiency, reducing costs or setting the foundations for new solutions.

It can also be achieved through ‘Critical to Quality’ workshops in which both parties work to improve the current efficiency of their daily activities. This will be mutually beneficial – with customer and provider alike investing time to enhance the customer’s operations, processes and future solutions. Working together in this collaborative style will serve to deepen the relationship on both sides.

2-  ***Suggestions on cost reduction***:

Understand where you spend your money-Buy Only What You Need:

Determine what goods you need and services you require.  There is no need for gold - plated service if standard services are adequate.  Buying unnecessary extras or add-on services such as maintenance agreements will prevent you getting value for money.  Also, avoid loyalty programs that offer freebies such as bottles of wine or tickets to sporting events to lure you away from more competitive offerings.
 

Consolidate your purchasing-Rationalise Suppliers:

Quite often, we see different divisions or departments within the one company buying from a variety of suppliers, losing any opportunity to consolidate purchasing and negotiate better pricing.
 

Bench mark your procurement-Always Compare:

Your suppliers will always know the market better than you will, so never assume that they're providing you the best deal possible.  For instance, are your competitors buying better than you for the same products?  How does your cost-management performance compare to others?  Talk to consultants or benchmarking services, but make sure you understand the information correctly; otherwise you're paying for useless information.
 

Build strong supplier relationships-Build Relationships, Not Just Another Debtor:

Building a good relationship with suppliers will enhance opportunities for cost reductions.  Engage your suppliers for suggestions on how to improve the way in which you purchase their goods and services.  Ordering online, or less frequently, may allow them to reduce their own administration costs and enable them to pass the savings on linking your stock levels to their ordering platform and provide monitoring of your PAR levels (protection against run-out), avoiding any loss of sales.
 

Maintain controls on your purchasing-Empower the Right People:

Ensure you have separate staff responsible for negotiating terms to those involved in day to day operations.  Staff empowered to order product need to establish good relationships with suppliers and so may not be the best negotiators come tender time.  Use the good cop/bad cop approach, calling in someone else, so that emotion is not involved in the process.
 

Continually test your suppliers-Know the Market:

Companies that buy the same product and quantities year in, year out can become very complacent and are probably paying way too much.  Suppliers will price their offerings according to what the market will bear.  Compare prices across suppliers and, having done your research, tell suppliers that you are reviewing your costs, which have to be reduced.  Then prepare to negotiate and to comparison shop.
 

Ensure you have open book pricing-Demand Transparency:

Negotiate open book pricing so you have full transparency.  Every supplier is entitled to a margin; however you want to be confident it is not inflated.  Don't accept price increases without proof that the increase is a result of supply-chain cost increases beyond their control and not just a blow-out in costs that they are trying to pass on.
 

Be Consistent-Measure Result:

Create a culture of ongoing cost management, not just a "flavour of the month" approach.  Establish benchmarks that allow for ongoing comparison, to ensure you are always on top of costs.  Measure them as a percentage of sales, thereby ensuring that if sales drop, you can see costs drop accordingly.
 

Stay Alert-Keep Going Forward:

Maintaining strong cost management is critical to the success of any business.  Ensure staff doesn't revert to old habits, watch your suppliers, and monitor your benchmarks.  You need to watch that staff members don't slip back into old habits.  Of all cost reduction programs approximately 84% of projects slip back to previous pricing within 2 years.  Engage an expert or appoint a dedicated staff member to this, and they will soon pay their way.

3- ***Suggestions on innovation***:

1-    Innovation only comes by invitation. Invite people to bring forth their new ideas. True innovation takes place when people are free to raise ideas, take ownership of them, and then implement them. If people are required to ask permission for every step they take, they will stop asking permission.

Recommended by Forbes

2-     Innovation is not a solo sport, it requires a group of players with skills specific to the effort. Many companies appoint an innovation department or hire a chief innovation officer, which can make innovation just another stovepipe in the organization. The message this sends to your organization is that innovation is “their job” and “not mine” – siloed off. While an idea may come from one individual, it’s the cross-functional creativity, trust, and collaboration that bring innovation to life.

3-    Encourage everyone to put their ideas to test fast, fail fast, and then reiterate. If people wait for perfection before they put the idea to work, the effort will lose steam before it ever gets off the ground.

4-    Value the lessons taken from failure as much as your successes, and apply those lessons toward each new attempt. This makes it safe for everyone to innovate. The idea is not to encourage failure but to foster innovation that leads to winning success as rapidly as possible.

5-    Ensure this behavior gets modeled at every level, from the very top to individual contributor. That means the senior leaders must be actively involved, not just mandating the change.

6-    Resist the desire to project manage your way to innovation. It cannot be generated by focusing solely on budgets, resources, and timelines. If you try, you can guarantee your innovation investment will be wasted.