Preface

On August 19, 2019, 181 presidents of the largest companies in the United States, from Apple’s Tim Cook to Amazon’s Jeffrey P. Bezos to Dennis A. Muilenburg of Boeing, gathered at the influential Business Roundtable and signed a manifesto that redefines the mission of business¹. Believing that maximizing shareholder value should no longer be the company’s primary focus and sole priority, the signatories put stakeholders, first and foremost the customer, at the heart of corporate responsibility: “delivering value to the customer”, “investing in employees”, “dealing fairly and ethically with suppliers”, “supporting the communities in which the company works”, “protecting the environment” and “generating long-term shareholder value”.

      Although the most skeptical commentators see it as an obligatory and principled response to the injunctions of investors² and the most enthusiastic as a revolution, the manifesto nevertheless brings to light principles that are widely debated in management. Stakeholder theory and customer orientation, long discussed in the academic literature and applied to corporate practices, clearly resonate with this new definition of the company.

Since the 1990s, customer orientation has been recognized as a major alternative approach to positioning on price, product or business, in order to better face competitive challenges and keep the company focused on its markets. This customer orientation is seen as a strategic orientation of the company, validated by the general management, and put in priority in the hands of the senior executives of the C-suite such as CMO (Chief Marketing Officer), CCO (Chief Customer Officer) or CXO (Chief Customer Experience Officer). So how do we get this customer orientation down to the field? How can we find the intention of the leaders in the practices, behaviors and interactions, especially with customers, and more broadly with all the stakeholders of the company? How can we also free up energy at all levels of the company, so that customer orientation can be enriched on a daily basis? The key lies in the involvement of managers and field staff in the implementation of customer orientation and in their strong adherence to its principles and values. A customer-oriented manager becomes, on the one hand, the intermediary between an ambition and its realization, and on the other hand, the activator of a continuous renewal of this orientation as close as possible to the market.

B2B³ service is a legitimate, necessary and urgent field of application for customer orientation. First, it is legitimate to focus on it specifically because of its economic dynamism. In an economy dominated by services, business services account for nearly half of the value added of market services and concentrate exports⁴. While the field of services is widely covered by a large body of academic and managerial literature, it is essentially focused on B2C. It is, therefore, necessary to deepen our knowledge of B2B services, beyond a simple superposition of the specificities of the service offer on the one hand, and the B2B market on the other hand. As markets inevitably mature, the challenges of increased competition and commoditization of the offer will sooner or later make customer orientation particularly urgent for service providers. A technical or business orientation, in which customers are insufficiently understood in their complexity and taken into account in their needs and expectations, is still dominant. While managers in charge of developing and launching offers are in a strong and lasting relationship with customers, observation of practices too often leads us to the findings that, at best, the players are not aware of their role in this customer orientation, and that, at worst, they reproduce approaches and behaviors that are in conflict with the balance between customer satisfaction and the profitability of their company.

      The aim of the book is to provide managers with the skills that will enable them to launch customer orientation in their area. More precisely, the objective is to provide managers with the knowledge and tools necessary to implement this customer orientation by themselves, while involving their extended team. With this in mind, the book develops a structuring approach in four steps: Understanding the fundamentals of customer orientation in B2B services (Part 1), Knowing the customer (Part 2), Making the most of the offer (Part 3) and Delivering the service (Part 4).

      While this new managerial skill may seem burdensome at first, both in its acquisition and implementation, the resulting benefits should encourage the manager to go beyond this apparent difficulty of the task. Managers will benefit in three ways: as collaborators, they will be recognized for having implemented a strategic intention and vision; as leaders, by consolidating the performance of their perimeter, their legitimacy will be reinforced and as a person, the pleasure of building a relationship of trust with their clients and their extended team will give their actions the meaning so often sought after.

      This book is not about management, but for managers, whether they are active or aspiring. Regardless of the size and stakes of their perimeter, whether they are accompanied by functional teams or in autonomy and whether they are employees or entrepreneurs, managers will be able to easily adapt the roadmap proposed here to their specific context. Engineering students, most of whom will sooner or later be called upon to take on managerial responsibilities, will be made aware of this customer orientation issue as soon as they start their studies. Finally, and more broadly, students in management schools will find in the book a complement to their courses in management and marketing of services, which are increasingly common in training, as well as to courses dedicated to B2B, which are rarer. In view of the numerous internships and work-study programs offered to these students by B2B service providers, this supplement should enable them to more quickly grasp the specificities of their missions.

      November 2021

Introduction to Part 1

      This first part presents the three fields at the intersection