Customer Connections: New Strategies for Growth

by Paul M. Cole and Robert E Wayland

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875847994
• ISBN13: 9780875847993
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 267 Pages
• Weight: 5.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A good manual for strategic thinking for advanced managers

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)

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. That said, the book clearly lays out what CEO's are wrestling with in trying to center strategy around customers. After years of focus on internal processes, this work guides early stage thinking about a different infrastructure. As a consultant working in this area, I am giving this book to my clients for the holidays. This is not light reading. The authors have passed the popular motivational style that is prevalant in current works about customers in favor of serious content. While I could argue that the emphasis on quantitative methods does reduce the importance of single customer interactions, the work is balanced enough not to exclude that approach. Neither have Wayland and Cole asked us to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Their arguemet for balancing demand side strategy with supply side should be required reading for anyone in the planning cycle.