The new customer relationship management tool – product elimination?

The creation of long-term customer purchasing relationships depends upon continually aligning products to customer's needs, fulfilling their expectations, building/sustaining trust, and facilitating satisfaction. Product elimination can potentially destroy these. In financial services the ownership of the product remains shared between the customer and organisation. To fully eliminate a product requires that it is removed from customers, which may drive them to seek alternative suppliers. The product management challenge is how to manage customers through an elimination action whilst strengthening their purchasing relationship with the organisation, if desired. Financial service product elimination is fundamentally about managing customers out of one product into another, or out of the organisation. Elimination can, by choice of elimination strategy, be used to improve the offerings a customer has, or to encourage them to exit the organisation. This provides the basis for using product elimination as customer relationship management tool.

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