Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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

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.