Gartner: CEO priorities shifting from cost-cutting to customer retention

Top management priorities will shift over the year ahead from the cost-cutting focus of early 2009 towards retaining customers and improving existing relationships, according to Gartner.

But chief executives’ "recession-era mentality" will continue until 2015, with fears of another economic crisis being high on the agenda for at least another 36 months.

Such concerns are also mirrored among the wider public, however, which has been slow to return to traditional spending habits – a difficult situation in economies such as the UK and US, which are very based on consumer spending for growth.

As a result, a key priority for many organisations during 2010 will be to rebuild trust in their brand in order to regain consumer confidence. While many are still in the process of rebuilding such trust in the wake of a number of corruption and fraud scandals over recent times, Gartner says it is optimistic that this year and next will see the start of confidence returning.

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