Dear Friends,

We find ourselves today in extremely interesting times. Businesses the world over are undergoing a transformation. Under pressure to perform in adverse global economic conditions, organizations have been reorienting themselves to maintain competitiveness and sustain growth. The experience of the last few years has propelled companies to take the path of innovation—both in terms of their products and services—and seek fresh differentiators for themselves in an extremely challenging environment.

Leaders of reputed companies are seeking ways to re-invent their organizations and make them leaner and meaner. The aim is to do more with less and optimally utilize existing resources and investments.

At the same time, the focus is also on retaining existing customers, generating repeat business from them and adding new clients to the global portfolio. With customer loyalty increasingly becoming a question mark and companies gravitating towards the “best deals,” vendors are looking at how they can enhance “client stickiness” by presenting the most cost-effective, efficient, and unmatched value proposition to their users. A big part of this exercise is positioning the organization as one which is completely tuned to their ever changing needs and ready with relevant solutions that directly address their pain points. In other words, the focus is now on Customer Responsiveness, where immediate understanding of customer challenges and fast solution turnarounds are the name of the game.

Making their organization more agile, more dynamic, and more proactive when it comes to responding to customers is becoming the key task for top management. Customer Responsiveness, in fact, is the new competence that companies are seeking and aggressively going after. Using Responsiveness as a tool, organization are not only reacting proactively to shifting business paradigms; they are also combating risks and challenges.

Getting responsive also implies that companies have efficient real-time reaction capabilities across geographies and that an actual strategy exists that helps them raise the bar when it comes to Customer Responsiveness. Today, CEOs are keenly looking at how Customer Responsiveness can become part of organizational DNA and culture and how an ecosystem of CR can be created where each and every employee knows what has to be done to enhance the customer experience.

Given that Customer Responsiveness is a key value-add to businesses of today, there was a need felt to have a space where industry leaders could get together and deliberate over this crucial business edge. It is this singular aim that led to the creation of this platform called CEO Forum for Customer Responsiveness. I hope that under the aegis of this unique platform, CEOs will be able to share their insights and experiences on Customer Responsiveness with peers and discover new way of making CR an even more effective growth strategy in the years ahead.

Anil Nair
Jt. Managing Director and President, AGC Networks Ltd.