In the research of customer satisfaction, a company which used to focus on a high quality customer service can perform a lot better implementing the strategic alignment. Doing an analysis of its customers through the buying behavior segmentation filter, the company can discover that the majority of its customers gave more importance to lower prices and efficiency rather than a customer service of high quality.
A strategy aligned on what the customer is expecting from the company allow the company to better allocate its resources. In this assumption, the energy, the money and the staff allocated to maintain a customer service of quality can be re-allocated to look for lower prices in the supply chain and can spend more time for example looking for lower prices on the market of the suppliers for the company. By moving resources from a department that didn't respond to customer needs to an other that fit with customer expectations, the strategy is more adapted, aligned, with the market environment.
Of course, it is not recommended to erase all the budget allocated to customer service because there is still a part of the customers portfolio that are interested in receiving a good quality service with the product they buy. Here, the costs involved in a big customer service and those in a performing procurement department are not the same. Thus, we can see that under a same goal of customer satisfaction the costs involved in the structure are lower than in the second option. This example illustrate a movement from the traditional paradigm to the new one.
L"Oreal Europe is a good example of a re-allocation of resources. This world wide company used to have a specific strategy (products, image, ) in regards of the country they were doing business with. Each subsidiary in each country had to support a different supply chain and all the departments ( accounting, logistics, HRM, ) working around the core activity.
