Customers refer to individuals who buy goods and/or services from a business for consumption or use (Murby & Gould, 2005). Customers can either be relevant or irrelevant depending on the level of their interest on the product sold by an organization. Relevant customers are those customers who are interested in a business’ product or service, whereby this relevance is affected by several other factors. Irrelevant customers on the other hand refer to those customers who have little or no interest in a given product and/or service. Certain companies such as Blockbuster, Dell, Eastman Kodak, and Motorola, to mention but a few do not have relevant customers to take into consideration. Notably, these companies were once leaders in business performance in their respective industries but came to crumble at one point in time and have never regained momentum to their time of glory. Unlike other successful organizations where all parts of a balanced scorecard operate equally, these organizations concentrate only on giving too much attention on long term rather than short term issues such as financial and budgetary. That is, their strategy does not give equal or “balanced” focus on such crucial components such as customers and stakeholders as well as organizational values and thereby rendering them unable to meet customers at their various points of need (Mackay, 2004). In addition, organizations without relevant customers to consider are not always involved with innovation and learning in a bid to understand the best ways possible to ensure not only in customer satisfaction. Given the prevailing rapid technological changes, organizations ought to prioritize customers because they are the reason why businesses exist and it is only by satisfying their needs beyond expectations that an organization can be able to thrive in this highly competitive business world (PDC Professional Publishing, 2010).
References
Mackay, A. (2004). A Practitioner’s Guide to the Balanced Scorecard. CIMA, 1-63.
Murby, L., & Gould, S. (2005). Effective Performance Management with the Balanced Scorecard. CIMA-Technical Report, 3-38.
PDC Professional Publishing. (2010). Customer Centric Product Definition. New York: PDC Professional Publishing.