Vad betyder kundfokus? En studie av närhet, kompetens och teknik

Sammanfattning: This is a dissertation about customer focus. Customer focus is a concept that can be understood in terms of giving the customer what the customer wants. It has been argued that the industrial society has transformed into a service society with the obvious consequence that services nowadays play a leading part, not at least in regard to customer focus. The customer of today is claimed to have lost interest in mass consumption and is much attracted to personalized and unique solutions, something that results in the fact that businesses must create or develop customer focus, i.e. listen to the customers wishes, needs, and demands. According to most researchers in this field, service excellence is the primary aspect one firm can use in order to successfully compete with other similar firms.



According to Service Management, customer focus is much about developing a personal relationship between the service provider (employee) and the customer. In order to that, the service provider needs to adjust his or hers behaviour in accordance with the customer. This circumstance has a tendency to lead to a master-and-servant relation, in which the service provider must obey the various wishes, needs, and demands any customer may have.



Most studies on customer focus have been undertaken in the context of low skill service work, but the results have often (implicitly) been generalized to comprise all service work in the whole service sector. As a consequence of this situation, my survey takes on high skill service work (banking and health care). The main purpose of the survey is to examine if the results and analyses, presented from service management apply when the services are not low skill.



The results from this survey shows that Service Managements heavily emphasis of the personal relationship between employee and customer in which the service provider in some meaning need to undertake the role of a servant can be questioned. The results also show that there is a discrepancy between (bank customers and patients) opinion on an abstract comprehensive level and a specific level where various situations and errands are defined. Further, the dissertation shows that the various factors that can be included in the conception of customer focus, need to be examine more carefully. Some factors integrate in a way that makes it difficult to separate them, and one specific factor can in fact hold a variety of essences.