Introduction
The managers and owners of Club IT, Lisa and Reuben have just renovated the interior of the nightclub. However, Lisa and Reuben have been faced with the challenge of managing the information of Club IT. As an intern at Club IT, I have been hired to implement the strategy Club IT needs in building a community that meets regularly at the night club. The strategy should help Club IT have a competitive advantage over other night clubs. I have learnt some of the back office operations and I am also familiar with the Club IT website, and I will help Lisa and Reuben achieve their primary strategic objective of building a community that meets regularly at Club IT. To help Club IT meets its primary strategic objective, there is need of strategic information system to enhance competitive advantage that will help in increasing the performance of Club IT (Rainer &Turban, 2008).
Information Strategy for a Competitive Advantage
The mission of Club IT seeks to build a community that meets regularly at Club IT by offering live music, dance space, DJ’s and refreshments that suits the lifestyle of the clients. The primary clienteles of Club IT are friends to Lisa and Reuben. The competitive strategy used by Club IT will ensure that the industry acquires competitive advantage. Club IT will therefore outshine all the other nightclubs in the area due to the increased competitive advantage. In order for Club IT to build a community that meets regularly at the nightclub, Club IT should suit the lifestyle of the clients. Since Lisa and Reuben seeks to build a community that meets regularly at the night club, the best strategy to use to ensure competitive advantage is the strategy of customer-orientation (Rainer &Turban, 2008).
Customer-orientation strategy focuses on making clienteles happy. To ensure that clients come regularly to Club IT, they should be made happy. This can be done by the management of the Club IT’s information resources such as the intranet and the website. Web-based systems ensure effective relationship between the customers and the management. The web will be able to increase access for the clients to get more information for the products and service offered at Club IT (Rainer &Turban, 2008). Customer-orientation strategy is associated to creating customer satisfaction and loyalty that will increase the competitive advantage of Club IT by making the customers happy (Luo & Seyedian, 2003).
To make the customers happy, Lisa and Reuben should seek to know most if not all of the customers that come to Club IT. This will help in identifying and provide the needs of the customers of Club IT. This can be achieved by a computerized information system that will capture the customers’ information. The information can be used for creating membership for the customers and giving incentives such as discounts for all customers that have membership. Knowing customers through membership cards will enhance customer loyalty therefore, building a community that meets regularly at Club IT (Ng-Chee, 2004).
Lisa and Reuben should also seek to deliver value to their customers by improving their services regularly. This can be done by connecting with the customers always through communication such as exhibition of events, suggestions and advertisements through the Club IT website. Lisa and Reuben should also empower all the employees of Club IT through training and motivation to ensure that they have the necessary experience and capabilities to offer quality service to the customers. The employees should be able to access information about the customers through the knowledge management system to be able to make conversant decisions that benefits the customers. Club IT’s website will have a customer-based business management that will help the employees have the desired attitude and behavior through specific goals, measurements and rewards that have been put in place. These customer-based business managements include operational knowledge to ensure performance management, enabling knowledge to ensure that that the employees are continually improved and behavioral knowledge to manage the employees (Ng-Chee, 2004).
Conclusion
Customer-orientation strategy is a basis for building a strong customer loyalty to ensure that Lisa and Reuben will build a community that meets regularly at Club IT. The economy has lead to power shift of businesses focusing on customer orientation. Which explains Lisa’s and Reuben’s primary objective of building a community that meets regularly at Club IT. Lisa and Reuben aims at building a long term relationship with their customer in order to gain and increase their competitive advantage. For customer to be happy and loyal to Club IT, Lisa and Reuben should by focus on offering services that satisfy their customers (Ng-Chee, 2004). Customer-orientation strategy is related to customer satisfaction and loyalty that will enhance the competitive advantage of a business (Luo & Seyedian, 2003).
Reference
Luo, X., & Seyedian, M. (2003). Contextual Marketing and Customer-Orientation Strategy for E-Commerce: An Empirical Analysis International Journal of Electronic Commerce. 8 (2), 95-118.
Ng-Chee, C. (2004). Three Critical Steps to Customer-centric Business Orientation. Web.
Rainer, K., &Turban, E. (2008). Introduction to Information Systems: Supporting and Transforming Business (Ed.), Information Systems: Concepts and Management (2nd ed., pp. 28-57). San Francisco: Wiley Publishing.