Customer Relationship Management

Contents: Preface. 1. Introduction. 2. Strategy. 3. Customer value and service orientation. 4. The key to a sustainable competitive advantage. 5. Understanding the customer. 6. Designing and developing superior customer value. 7. Delivering customer--focused value. 8. Maximizing yield from value-creating assets. 9. Selecting and attracting the right customers. 10. Guaranteeing customer value and product quality. 11. Customer defection management. 12. Ensuring a customer-focused corporate culture. Bibliography. Index.

"The book begins with very straightforward questions of how the firm defines itself and what service orientation means. It then leads the reader into the logic of what a firm needs in order to be customer focused--that is, knowledge of the customer. It should become abundantly clear that only with the proper understanding of the customer can a firm be customer focused. Only then can the firm\'s activities and decisions be guided toward meeting the purpose of its being. Its value creation activities will be aligned to the customer\'s value consumption activities so that the relationship (in some cases, a finite set of interactions) between firm and customer becomes mutually beneficial.

This book should be most useful to the professional who is well versed in the technical operations of a firm and would like to get a comprehensive feel of the customer-focused perspective that is so often implied and assumed to be understood in business discussions. Unfortunately, these professionals (engineers, programmers, health care workers such as doctors, nurses, and technicians, financial services providers, and so on), experts in their own technical fields, are not necessarily well acquainted with the concepts and techniques of customer-focused management or of a service orientation. These professionals rely on their own experience or other means of exposure to obtain an understanding of the fundamentals of competing through service in a customer-focused firm." (jacket)