Re-engineering the direct marketing organization structure: A business process view

Abstract

Most contemporary direct marketing organizations are structured around business functions such as sales, marketing, customer service, product procurement, and accounting. In this paper we argue that the functional view does not fully realize the direct marketer's potential in satisfying and creating value for customers. As an alternative we develop a business process view of direct marketing using concepts from business process re-engineering. In this framework, the organization is conceptualized as a set of end-to-end processes cutting across several functional areas. Based on an actual re-engineered consumer direct marketing organization, we contrast the traditional functional view with the business process view and discuss implications for diret marketing strategy, performance measurement, and impact on customer satisfaction in the two frameworks. We show how a functional view drives performance measurement towards evaluating each functional area separately, resulting in suboptimal performance due to potentially conflicting objectives and procedures of different functional areas. In contrast, we show how a business process view is better able to resolve these conflicts by making customer satisfaction the key business objective.