Customer Connections: New Strategies for Growth [Hardcover]

Robert E. Wayland (Author), Paul M. Cole (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Customer Connections combines excellent research, creative theory, useful models, everyday metaphors, and insightful business examples. This book not only takes the customer' and customer value' to the next level of integration into our businesses, but is compelling, easily understood, and enjoyable. It is a must for the twenty-first century business leader. --L. R. Codey, President, Public Service Electric & Gas Company

With a fine blend of case examples and a practical framework for managers, Wayland and Cole make a compelling case for putting customer relationships at the center of the strategy dialogue. --George Day, Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor at the Wharton School, The University of Pennsylvania

Here, in one place, is all you need to know about winning the battle for the customer in the Information Age. Readers will find Customer Connections both a call--and an invaluable guide--to action. --David Marshall, Chief Information Officer and Senior Managing Director, Bankers Trust

Whether you are a Fortune 1000 manager or an entrepreneur, Customer Connections is a must-read. Wayland and Cole have written a definitive, customer-based strategy text that helps you fundamentally rethink your business and provides the tools you need to maximize return on the customer relationship. --Lois H. Benedetti, Ph.D., Director, Business Planning and Strategy, GTE Long Distance

For those of us who are equally and simultaneously disciples of relationship marketing' and proponents of shareholder value creation, Wayland and Cole have bridged the chasm, delivering powerful insights and balance in a clear, strategic format. A very useful book. --Charles L. Watkins, President, DukeSolutions, Duke Energy's Integrated Energy Services Company

Wayland and Cole offer a solid model grounded in real-world experience. This is a clear, logical way of working through relationship strategies. --Susan Cook, Director, Corporate Product Marketing, Hewlett-Packard Company

About the Author

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

Product Details

• Hardcover: 267 pages
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press; First Edition edition (September 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0875847994
• ISBN-13: 978-0875847993
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,326,778 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good manual for strategic thinking for advanced managers, August 13, 1998

By 

Dr. David Arelette (Yarrambat, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Customer Connections: New Strategies for Growth (Hardcover)

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)

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Where are your company in the ¡§customer relationship¡¨?, March 24, 2002

By 

On Ki, Lau (Department of Marketing, City University of HK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Customer Connections: New Strategies for Growth (Hardcover)

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Adding Economic Value through Customer Relationships, November 15, 2001

By 

Donald Mitchell "Jesus Loves You!" (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 110,000 Helpful Votes Globally) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Customer Connections: New Strategies for Growth (Hardcover)

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!