Hassan Sherwani ROLE OF SALES AND MARKETING IN ... - Oulu

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way of achieving this goal is to continuously generate new intelligence about customer
needs and to know best way to satisfy those (Stanley & John, 2000).
The relationship between customer value and customer satisfaction is opened up by Lam
et. al (2004) . It is argued that customer satisfaction is the result of a customer’s
perception of the value received in a transaction or relationship. Theoretically, customer
value can be considered a cognition-based construct capturing any benefit-sacrifice
discrepancy, whereas customer satisfaction is primarily an affective and evaluative
response. The social science literature indicates that cognitive thought processes trigger
affective responses, suggesting that customer value judgments affect perceptions of
satisfaction. It has been argued that customer value has a positive effect on customer
satisfaction. The main challenge for any firm is to maximize the effectiveness of
customer value creation activities for the firm. These activities are considered as
processes that may cut across several functions within an organization. According to
Hammer (1996), a process perspective on a business is the customer’s perspective which
simply means that a process requires that one should start with the customers and what is
required from their point of view, and work backward from there. Moreover, the focus is
shifting from the activity of attracting customers to activities which concern having
customers and taking care of them. Delivering customer value is critical to the success of
any business. But customer expectations are continually evolving, changing, and
increasing so firms must be searching for ways to improve and expand or risk failure.
The old axiom that management’s primary responsibility is to “manage change or
change management” has never been more realistic. Today’s rapidly changing business
environment places a huge penalty on status quo management (Gale, 1994). In addition,
customer behavior plays an important role in after sales activates and operations where
customer behavior can be understood well by collecting inputs from customers through
various sources, integrating them and verifying the integrated and accuracy of collected
data. Therefore, it is recommended that every organization should do their research in
understanding their behavior with the help of integrated team of marketing and sales
professionals. Hence all organizations must engage themselves in studying customers
through an exclusive department with dedicated team of marketing professionals.