Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Customer Connections: New Strategies for Growth by Robert E. Wayland, Paul Michael Cole ISBN: 0-87584-799-4 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: September, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 2.55 (11 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Where are your company in the ¡§customer relationship¡¨?
Comment: I found that this book is useful as it introduced a useful tool for customer relationship. The author introduced a great customer relationship model, ¡§The Value Compass¡¨.
I think that it is important for the company to understand that ¡§reduce cost¡¨ is not the most important element to achieve success. Instead, company should put effort on creating value in order to achieve goal. And we have already known that the cost of retaining customer is much lower than the cost of acquiring new customers. So, why look for new customers, when you can improve the ones you¡¦ve already got?
Customer satisfaction is one of the elements of retaining customers. And customer satisfaction can be done by ¡§creating value¡¨. This book introduced you with ¡§The Value Compass¡¨ which provided you a great tool to create value and thus build up long-term customer relationship.
With the help of ¡§The Value Compass¡¨, company can position itself among different dimensions of relationship value. After know ¡§where you are¡¨, company should decide ¡§where are you going to be¡¨, according to ¡§The Value Compass¡¨. Then the company can achieve the target position by prepare customer connection strategy, which has discussed by this book.
So, if you are in the management level of your company, if you want your company to create value to the customers in order to build long-term customers relationship, you may read this book to achieve your goal more efficiently and effectively.
Rating: 2
Summary: Not bad!
Comment: Customer connection
After reading this book, you will know what is the customer relationship model, that is the value compass and foundation of customer connection strategy.
I do agree that the author did present the book in an academic way which is quite bored. For the value compass, it is a complicated model and it is not easy to be understood. However, I remember that the author did distinguish the difference among the product manager, process manager and the network manager, this part is quite good and clear.
Also the author did explain the customer equity by using the equation, it¡¦s quite good and impressed.
Generally, I think you can learn something from this book, for example, we know that we need to create long term relationship with our customers and the critical success factor for running a business is to create value to the customers but not to reduce cost for the business.
Rating: 3
Summary: Adding Economic Value through Customer Relationships
Comment: 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!
 |
Title: The Discipline of Market Leaders: Choose Your Customers, Narrow Your Focus, Dominate Your Market by Michael Treacy, Fred Wiersema ISBN: 0201407191 Publisher: Perseus Publishing Pub. Date: January, 1997 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
