How to Win Customers in the Digital World: Total Action or Fatal Inaction [Hardcover]

Peter Vervest (Author), Al Dunn (Author), M. Hoogeweegen (Contributor), N.F. Cameron (Contributor), T. Weesing (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 14, 2000

Providing a template for seizing the opportunities offfered by digital business technologies, this book presents six real-life cases to demonstrate both the power and risks involved. The authors - both experienced professionals in management education and telecommunications - introduce Total Action concepts and methodologies - where every activity inside the organization is directly relevant for its customers. Winners use these to make front-line people the point of decision making, to unlock information about customers, and to manage the fulfillment of their commitments. The result is a discovery tour of new management concepts that will help your business triumph in todays digital world.
From the reviews: "This book is mandatory reading for every manager and professional." - Thomas Middelhoff, Chairman & CEO Bertelsmann AG; "This is a powerful and straightforward starting point for all managers and organizations seeking to master the new frontiers of business." A.-W. Scheer, Chairman of the Supervisory Board IDS Scheer AG

Editorial Reviews

Review

Statements for the book:
"The digital world is Bertelsmann's world. It is transforming every aspect of our business as media products are digitized and marketed through the Internet: The key question is "how to win and retain customers" in this new and challenging, digital world. This book provides a very sharp insight into the key issues and the actions to be taken. Al Dunn and Peter Vervest give a vivid description of those who will win: Total Action companies that make every activity directly relevant for their customers constrasting them with the "Fatal Inaction" reality of so many large organisations today. In this radically changing environment, this book is mandatory reading for every manager and professional." (Thomas Middelhoff, Chairman & CEO Bertelsmann AG)
"Total Action is a compelling concept and practice for securing a strong position in the challenging digital world. The key message - how to organise from the individual customer inwards using digital business technologies - is fundamental. The application of "modularity" to organise for and manage instant fulfillment across a network of internal and external parties is an impressive addition to business practice. This is a powerful and straightforward starting point for all managers and organisations seeking to master the new frontiers of business." (A.-W. Scheer, Chairman of the Supervisory Board -IDS Scheer AG- and Director of the Institute for Information Systems, University of the Saarland, Saarbruecken/Germany)
"The phrase "customer oriented" takes on an entirely new, revolutionary, meaning in the digital age. Total Action is a how-to book that shows, using eye-opening real experiences, how to achieve this." (Kenneth Preiss, The Sir Leon Bagrit Professor: Technology and Global Competitiveness, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel)
"Organisations searching for a route into the "digital world" of e-Business need the concepts and practices of Total Action: they are a true eye-opener. Vervest and Dunn have avoided the "simple answers" to what organisations must and can do to succeed in winning customers. "How to win customers in the digital world" helps you understand that the answers are not easy - but the concepts are straightforward. Every manager will recognise the shortcomings of his or her own organisation in this book and, as a result, identify their route to Total Action. This is a compelling insight into the ways in which organisations must act and organise differently and effectively to master the digital world." (Professor Dr. Jo van Nunen, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Rotterdam School of Management)
"Every organization must strive for Total Action. Winning the customer in today's highly competitive and demanding world is the key to ensuring success. The authors confront traditional ways of organizing with the capabilities of the new, digital business technologies. They are critical of the frozen behaviour of today's large organizations. I believe that this book brings simple, powerful ideas on how to organise for customer success. It puts a manager's perspective into the amazing, but sometimes confusing, developments of today's telecommunications and computer technologies and what they really mean for all organizations." (Ben Verwaayen, Vice Chairman, Lucent Technologies USA)

From the Back Cover

What is so different about today's digital business technologies? Why is "digitisation" so important? Why is the Internet making such tremendous impact? What should my organisation do? What should I do?
How to win customers in the digital world presents a template for seizing the opportunities of the new digital business technolgies. It speaks about what the technology can do for you, as a user, senior manager, strategist, marketeer or sales director?
Six cases are presented - the army, the airline, the bank, the police, the telecommunications operator and the post. These real-life cases demonstrate both the power and the risks of the digital business technologies.
The winners use the technology to make front-line people the point of decision-making; to unlock information about customers; and to manage the fulfilment of their commitments. These are Total Action organisations, making every activity inside their organisation directly relevant for their customers.
The losers fail to change the "logic" of their organisation and suffer increasing degrees of "corporate autism": highly intelligent but inward facing corporate behaviour with little, if any, relevance for the outside world. They put the technology in place, but this only amplifies the shortcomings of their present organisation.
The authors - both experienced professionals in the field of telecommunications and management education - take you on a discovery tour of the new management concepts to create the winning organisation in the digital world of tomorrow.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 265 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (January 14, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3540665757
• ISBN-13: 978-3540665755
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,227,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A learning consultant from Buckinghamshire, U.K., June 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: How to Win Customers in the Digital World: Total Action or Fatal Inaction (Hardcover)

As a facilitator of client account management programmes that include a range of learning modules, I found "How to Win Customers in the Digital World" a significantly useful book. The majority of the discussed techniques are familiar; however, the real value of the book is the way that those techniques are made accessible to the user. The majority of books of this nature never take theory through to practical use ... but this book certainly does. Real, understandable, accessible customer situations are worked through in a a manner that the reader can absorb and apply for their own organisation.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Understanding the must do's in digital business, April 12, 2000

By 

graeme philipson (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Win Customers in the Digital World: Total Action or Fatal Inaction (Hardcover)

I don't write a lot of book reviews, not because I don't read a lot of books but because so few of them are worth reviewing. This week I'm going to make an exception since this is a very good book. The book is called "How to Win Customers in the Digital World", subtitled "Total Action or Fatal Inaction". The title and subtitle have been flipped since I saw the book in draft form a year or so ago. The authors are Al Dunn and his partner Peter Vervest. Al is based in London, and has spent most of his working life advising European telecommunications suppliers and carriers as well as other apparently slow-moving organisations on how to improve their customer service. As you can imagine, this is a difficult and thankless task. But he and Peter Vervest, plug away, spending a lot of time with companies like Finland's Nokia and Dutch and German and Swiss PTTs on change management and customer relations. (PTT is a peculiarly European acronym for "Post, Telephone and Telegraph", which indicates the term's long history. Despite being overtaken by technology and other events, it is still used to describe the major European telecommunications companies, many of which are still government owned or which behave as if they are). Al has been talking about the importance of the customer ever since I have known him, which is the best part of twenty years. Just about every organisation says that its customers are important, but a surprisingly small amount actually believe it, and even fewer adopt a customer focus as the cornerstone of their business philosophy. Common sense tells us that the customer is paramount, because they are after all the people who buy our products. But it is not just the computer industry that very often pays more attention to its products than to the people who buy them. We see it everywhere in business, and in life, and suppliers have to be constantly reminded that they are in business only because people want what they sell, are prepared to pay for it, and are happy to remain loyal if the service is good enough. This has always been true, and it always will be true. But now, with the growth of the Internet and electronic commerce, business practices are changing very quickly, and the nature of the relationship between supplier and customer is evolving accordingly. In the digital world the skills involved in attracting and retaining customers are different enough to warrant comment, hence the book. The authors make a major distinction between "total action" - which is roughly defined as "squeezing out" every activity that is not specifically important to the customer - and "fatal inaction" - intense activities that have no relationship to an organisation's performance with that customer. "These departments develop around themselves highly complex and rigid processes and systems. In due course they begin to perceive themselves as businesses in their own right, an error today's `business unit focus simply magnifies. "Such organisations often become dysfunctional. Their people, usually intelligent and competent, have become trapped in corporate autism, a serious handicap inherited from task-oriented production-line forbears. They become inward-facing internal markets for themselves, with rules and behavioural standards that are far too rigid for the digital business world." Sound familiar? The object becomes the process itself, rather than the end result of that process. Now, the Internet has vastly altered these processes and their capabilities for redefining customer interaction. "Digital technology, as best exemplified by the Internet, allows us to easily bring together vast amounts of related information. This information can be located anywhere in the world, but it can be presented with amazing clarity and relevance to provide links to all the sources from which the information has come. This fundamentally changes business. "This gives the customer the ability to transparently look into an organisation's operations, and make decisions with much more information and much more quickly than was previously the case. This, and the vastly improved access of the Internet, makes it much easier for customers to change their supplier. And that is death in the digital age." I recommend this book to you. "How to Win Customers in the Digital World" will remind you of the most important people in your life and how to deal with them

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Review from a consultant in this business, April 3, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: How to Win Customers in the Digital World: Total Action or Fatal Inaction (Hardcover)

This book has been written as a management book; the book is about a concept that has been worked out quite thouroughly and is illustrated by a number of good examples. Because i was quite familiar with the concepts, i could easily understand the content of this book; however i think that managers who are not too familiar with concepts like this will feel it hard to really use the material in their real life practice. They will probably understand that they have to start moving, but will have to read the examples probably twice to really understand the steps to undertake. The book gives good insight in the global steps to undertake, but could have been worked out in more detail to really deliver a management agenda.

Overall i am quite satisfied with this book and would recommend this book to others, especially managers in brick and mortar companies.