Expertise offered according to customer needs

Introduction

Today the success of organizations is increasingly based on the ability to identify, develop, and combine competences according to customer needs.  When competences or skills are offered to customers, the organization needs to recognise both their own strengths and limitations. When necessary, the experts in the bidding organisation need to seek partners and build skill-based services in a customer-oriented manner. This is especially important in paid services, where the added value produced for the customer determines both competitiveness and profitability to the organisations.

When developing paid services, the provider should be able to calculate the resources required. When developing services, it is always necessary to invest in the initial building services and required resources. This investment should be recouped within the desired time frame. Selling services alongside own work, in the worst case it can backfire on the provider. Sufficient resources should be allocated to service design.

Awareness of own limits and partnership needs

Recognising limits in the organisation’s skills and competences are essential. The organisation should not promise too much and should not sell the services which the customers require. When the skills cannot be found within the own organisation relevant partners may meet the customer’s needs in a suitable way. Partnerships and networks enable combinations of skills and competences to be offered. The result is often more than the sum of skills and competences provided. One plus one is often more than the sum.

Customer orientation and competence framework

Customer orientation means that the customer’s needs are placed in the centre, i.e., the customer’s perspective is being considered in the design of services. The aim is to produce solutions which meet the customers’ targeted special needs. The identification of competences helps an organization to focus on its core tasks and utilize external competences when it is of interest to the customer.

Combining competences and economic benefits

Combining different actors’ competences makes the operations more efficient and saves internal resources for other tasks. A cost-effective and high-quality entity is based on cooperation, when each party focuses on its core competences and complements each other. When skills are developed and shared, the competitiveness of the organizations enables continuous improvement and renewal.

Competences and qualitative assessment

Both individual and organizational goals are improved through continuous development and visibility. Qualitative assessment, e.g., skill assessments and development discussions, helps to identify both strengths and weaknesses. It is also to be remembered that competences are not always measurable.

Summary

Crystalising of competences according to customer needs requires knowledge of their own limitations and the opportunity to develop own competences. The activities consist of partnership building, customer-oriented thinking, knowledge, and combining competences. In this way, an organization can produce real added value for the customers. Through this, the organisation’s own competitiveness is also strengthened.

Gun Wirtanen
DSc (Tech), Senior Advisor in Food Safety
ORCID 0000-0002-5134-647X
SEAMK

Jari Alanko
M.Soc.Sc (Econ.), Senior Advisor (Intl. RDI)
SEAMK

Sami Perälä
MSc, RN, Development manager, Wellbeing Technology
ORCID 0000-0002-0853-3747
SEAMK

Bibliography

Matin, H.  Z.,  Jandaghi, G., Khanifar, H. &  Heydari, F. (2009). Designing a competent organizational culture model for customer oriented companies. African Journal of Business Management, 3(7), 281-293.

Vanhaverbeke, W. P. M. (1999). Realizing new regional core competence: establishing a customeroriented SME-network. NIBOR Research Memorandum No. 03. https://doi.org/10.26481/umanib.1999003.

Zhao, X. (2022). Customer orientation: A literature review based on bibliometric analysis. SAGE Open, https://doi.org/10.1177/21582440221079804.