Customer-Centric Digital Business Training: Evaluation of Entrepreneurs’ Skills and Training Content

Abstract

In an increasingly digitalised business environment, customer-centricity has become a key factor in ensuring long-term success and competitiveness for micro-enterprises. Understanding the needs of the customer is essential for developing sustainable and valuable digital services, as it enables micro-enterprises to target products and services efficiently. As customer needs and digital services are changing and evolving, the digital skills and competences of micro-enterprises often need to be developed or regularly refreshed. To understand how digital business training can foster a customer-centric approach in entrepreneurs, this paper examines the outcomes of a project providing digital skills training for micro-enterprises in the South Savo region, Finland. This two-year case study evaluates the effectiveness of the digital business training in developing customer understanding. The research questions are: 1) How do micro-entrepreneurs assess their level of customer understanding before and after attending the project’s training sessions? 2) How successful has the project been in fostering and supporting customer-centricity and understanding through its training programs? Following a customer-centric approach grounded in the theoretical literature, we surveyed 129 entrepreneurs using a questionnaire on digital business competences. Using metrics, we assessed the entrepreneur's level of customer understanding and the supporting business practices. Further, we analysed the content of 29 different digital business training courses to evaluate how they support, or not, entrepreneurs in improving their focus on the customer and the types of customer-oriented actions in their business operations. The results reveal that project contributed to a visible improvement in entrepreneurs’ customer-related competencies. Digital business training courses supported this by using customer-oriented methods and training sessions themselves being described in customer-centric way. More research would be needed on assessing the long-term impact of customer-centric digital business training on micro-enterprises’ operational practices, customer engagement, and sustained business growth, particularly in how newly acquired competencies are maintained, adapted to evolving digital environments, and translated into measurable business outcomes over time.