Customer Accounting by Massimiliano Bonacchi & Paolo Perego

Author:Massimiliano Bonacchi & Paolo Perego
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030019716
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

3.3.2 Organizational Structure

Company.net is a typical new economy enterprise with a business environment characterized by radical developments both in the services/products offered and in the deployment of business processes. The interviews revealed that, operating in a highly complex and hypercompetitive market, progressively increased the interdependence among functional units and the need to coordinate the business activities around the customer axis. As Company.net embarked on improving its coordination mechanisms, experimentation and fine-tuning became critical to ensure appropriate alignment among the elements of the organizational architecture as a continuous and adaptive work-in-progress. The firm’s structure is customer-centric both in its primary activities, as well as in its support activities. Primary activities deliver superior customer value through the identification of three decentralized customer-segments or business units (Value Added Services, Music and Games). These activities are centered around the segmentation of the customer base with a platform that allows customization of the offer (i.e. each customer has the possibility to choose from a bouquet of products in a single point of contact), interaction with each single customer registered on the platform, and interaction among customers through blogs, forums, and so forth. With such an ‘outside-in’ orientation of the value chain (Gulati 2009), specialization on customer-segments provides the advantage of clarifying decision rights, customizing offerings of services in a timely fashion and identifying new or market opportunities previously unexploited.

As a potential drawback of such business model, interviewees pointed out the risk of creating ‘legacy silos’ that tend to preserve function autonomy but create unnecessary overlays that makes decision-making processes more cumbersome. The top management realized the importance of removing roadblocks to coordination of silos through a number of mechanisms in which the support activities play a central role. In particular, Company.net created a Business Intelligence (BI) unit in line of the COO. Such formal appointment made customer centricity one of the most strategic issue discussed in the boardroom (Fig. 3.2). The BI unit therefore shifted role in a radical way. Originally formed as a highly specialized function devoted to delivering reliable customer data, the BI unit plays now a fundamental role in Company.net ’s architecture on two fronts. First, it developed a centralized customer information warehouse to promote unified access to customer data and encourage strategically collaborative sharing and use of customer data across business units. The BI unit ensures integration of multiple data sources on customers’ transactions and applies data management solutions and predictive analytics to understand subscribers’ behavior, usage characteristics and application performance. Second, the BI unit provides crucial service assurance solutions that enhance the firm’s internal reporting quality. Furthermore, BI proactively manages and strive to prevent the risk of data manipulation, a threat particularly evident in the mobile/Internet industry where data fragmentation and isolated data gathering makes data consolidation a major challenge.

Fig. 3.2Organizational structure of Company.net (source: Bonacchi and Perego 2012)

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