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Customer Connections: New Strategies for Growth
 
 

Customer Connections: New Strategies for Growth (Hardcover)

by Robert E Wayland (Author), Paul M Cole (Author) "In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Alice found herself in a land where, as the Red Queen says, It takes all the running you..." (more)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 267 pages
  • Publisher: Harvard Business School Press; illustrated edition edition (1 Sep 1997)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0875847994
  • ISBN-13: 978-0875847993
  • Product Dimensions: 24.1 x 16.3 x 2.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 112,773 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

    Popular in this category:

    #51 in  Books > Business, Finance & Law > Sales & Marketing > Customer Services
  • See Complete Table of Contents

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Product Description

Product Description

With this book, managers have a new strategic framework for making explicit connections between what they know about their customers and how they can leverage that information to create value. The authors reveal a comprehensive system that places customer relationships at the center of your business and shows you how to use this system to discover and tap new sources of value to improve your firm's profitability and growth.

Customer Connections is full of fresh, practical examples of companies-including ScrubaDub car wash, Inc. magazine, United Parcel Service, MCI Communications, and Wachovia Bank-that have creatively used information and knowledge management technologies to connect with their customers in new ways. It unveils a model for fostering collaboration and playing the right role in supply and demand chains, and gives you the tools for building a strategy based on the four key drivers of customer portfolio value: choosing the customers you want, selecting what you want to offer, deciding what role you should play in meeting their needs, and working together to create mutual value.

Wayland and Cole show you how to ask-and act on-the right questions about generating and managing customer knowledge, using connecting technologies, and understanding customer economics in order to assess your firm's current position and determine its ability to capture customer value in the future.

* Do you know the value of your customer relationship portfolio and manage it to maximize firm value?
* How can connecting technology can be used to collaborate with or learn from your buyers?
* What are the major determinants of supplier value to your customers? Are they the same across all customers?
* Are there opportunities to redesign your product to capture value from another part of the value chain?
* Which customers should you invite to participate in your product development efforts?
* How committed are you to your customers' success?

Customer Connections will help you discover new ways to think about value creation. It pulls together the strategy and the action plan for building and managing customer portfolios and for leveraging customer relationships for competitive advantage.



About the Author

Robert E. Wayland is President of Robert E. Wayland & Associates, a corporate strategy consulting firm in Concord, MA.

Inside This Book (Learn More)
First Sentence
In Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, Alice found herself in a land where, as the Red Queen says, It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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3.0 out of 5 stars Adding Economic Value through Customer Relationships, 6 May 2004
By Professor Donald Mitchell "Jesus Makes Me a P... (Boston) - See all my reviews
(TOP 10 REVIEWER)      
I like books that combine qualitative and quantitative techniques to describe what must be done. Customer Connections takes on the challenge of providing that perspective.

The book's basic point is that logical thinking can be applied to developing better economic results through analyzing and pursuing the potential of different ways to have relationships with various customers. For example, some customers buy more, more often, and of higher margin products or services. Find ways to attract more of their business and your enterprise is going to be more profitable and valuable. An example of Scrub-a-Dub the car wash company explores this idea.

You are encouraged to think through this opportunity by analyzing your mix of customers, the ways that you can add value for these customers, the risk involved in acquiring them, and ways of sharing risks and rewards with customers and suppliers. Then, you create a solution that combines all four elements to produce more economic value (discounted cash flow) for your company.

To do this, you are going to need to know more about your customers than many companies know today, keep them better informed about what you are doing, and use technology to strengthen your connections in economically beneficial ways. So, there's a basic knowledge management issue to be resolved.

Like many consultants, the authors propose a complicated model that requires lots of data-gathering, analysis, building of new data bases, and improved IT systems. Ultimately, the benefits can only be estimated in advance. A set of interviews with 200 Fortune 1000 executives suggests that knowing more about customers is associated with higher growth.

In the last four years I have done a lot of research into ways that companies have changed their business models to be more successful. In that research, I was struck that the kinds of thinking described in this book were hardly ever used. So although there are lots of examples in the book of applying these concepts, I really wonder if the process to be followed is the one described here. Ultimately, the book's process reminded me of the kind of mechanical "left-brained" planning that failed for so many companies in doing their strategic thinking. The methods I have seen used were based much more on inexpensive experiments, gut feel, and rapidly rolling out the successes. The approach here is more of the opposite. Find something that should be great. Make a big bet on it. Keep your fingers crossed that your one expensive experiment will work.

The value thinking in the book is also very primitive, basically only describing the expected discounted cash flow. Every enterprise has many different economic values at a given time (depending on its value form), and expected discounted cash flow is only one. You could have removed all of the "value" references and equations in this book and not lost very much.

Ultimately, I was concerned about the book's basic concept -- that you should be customer-based in your thinking rather than customer-driven or customer-led. Being customer-based in doing value calculations can be very misleading. Few market innovations have followed from understanding customer profitability better. You still have to understand customers better . . . as they see and feel themselves.

Create more beneficial results for all those you meet!

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1.0 out of 5 stars Lacks practical advice... ivory tower-ish, 19 Oct 1998
By A Customer
Wyland and Cole seems to caught up in their own ivory tower and show a lack of real experience on how to implement customer focus. Very dissapointing.
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4.0 out of 5 stars A good manual for strategic thinking for advanced managers, 13 Aug 1998
By A Customer
This is NOT a book for everyone - it is complex and takes time to fully absorb, but it is worth reading as there are numerous practical observations of how to look at customer interactions. I used it for my PhD and this is the level at which this book is best considered - if you know your stuff then this is worth buying - amateurs keep your money (for more Phantom comics)
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4.0 out of 5 stars A solid treatment of a complex subject. CEO reading!
Given both author's background, it is not surprising that they have taken a quantitative approach to the material. Read more
Published on 15 Dec 1997

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