Organizing the Customer Oriented Company: A Review of the Marketing and Sales Organization of ABB Robotics

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In today’s markets characterized by harsh competition companies must not only be well prepared to answer to customers current needs, they also need to be prepared for the future ones. A company that once was market leader of its industry can quickly become a market follower if the management team is unaware of how customers value the offering. The trend of today towards increasing the service to customers, raising the level of customization, and providing an experience for the customer has been called a paradigm shift toward customer orientation. The purpose with the thesis is to investigate how the organizational structure of a company hinders the customer orientation of a global marketing and sales organization expressed in symptoms and causes. In order to study the subject a case study was conducted on a large Swedish industrial company. 20 individual semi-constructed interviews were conducted with the top management team of the company. The result from the empirical study was that the organizational structure hindered the customer orientation of a company and that there is an interplay between the organizational structure of the company, the current business situation of the company, and the customer orientation of company. Communication patterns, trust, customer ownership and responsibility, integr...