Managing Customer Value

Managing Customer Value

Even today with quality improvement the battle cry of American industry, the quality programs in most companies are limited to "conformance to technical standards," according to quality expert Bradley Gale. While some have ventured a step farther to measure customer satisfaction, few of them, Gale demonstrates, have attempted to track market-perceived "quality" -- how buyers select among competing suppliers, why orders are won or lost, and which competitors are succeeding in which market segments. Using cases including Milliken & Company; AT&T, United Van Lines, and Gillette, Gale shows how leading-edge companies have gone beyond the minimal achievements of conformance quality and customer satisfaction to focus on the third, higher stage, "market-perceived quality versus competitors" and aspire to an emerging fourth stage, "true strategic management." Drawing on his extensive research at AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, Parke-Davis, and other world-class companies, Gale provides new metrics for market-perceived quality that are straightforward and easy to interpret. His set of seven integrative tools for customer value analysis makes up the heart of the "war room wall" to help guide business-unit teams in their effort to outperform competitors in satisfying customers. The great value of these tools is that they are derived from a future-oriented strategic navigation system that tracks competitive information and market-perceived quality. Learning to master this system accelerates customer satisfaction from a slogan to a science and leads ultimately to true strategic management -- the fourth stage of Total Quality Management. The processes described in this book provide an insider's perspective on the criteria of the Baldrige Award. Bradley Gale's insights and innovative methods for defining, measuring, and improving market-perceived quality will create an entirely new thrust for the worldwide quality movement.

Managing Customer Value

Managing Customer Value: One Stage At A Time

How do you take individuals who have never done business with your organization and work on them till some of them eventually become the best possible customers that you have? How do you decide how much to spend on various marketing tactics? How do you think about the pricing decision with a view to optimizing the value of your customers as assets? Where do you start — what tools do you use — what heuristics are useful in making these decisions? This book attempts to answer questions such as these. The one-sentence summary of the answer, though, is simple — hold the individuals hands and walk them through a value chain, one stage at a time.This book is written for an advanced student of business, as well as for the practicing manager, and presents an integrated view of the marketing function. In particular, it focuses on all the activities that a firm engages in to create and manage value, and not just the customer-facing activities. In that sense, it links the traditional views of customer value with the finance, accounting, human resources, organizational behaviour, information technology and operations functions. The content is meant to be prescriptive — it describes a process for value creation and management, yet analytical; theoretical, yet empirically driven. It urges the reader to think about the customer value function to be organized along activities that the firm would like the customers to engage in, not activities that the firm engages in. It presents a framework that is not only conceptually driven but also has a sound mathematical basis.