Breaking through: Implementing Customer Focus in Enterprises

Citation

(2005), "Breaking through: Implementing Customer Focus in Enterprises", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 54 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2005.07954cae.001

Breaking through: Implementing Customer Focus in Enterprises

Breaking through: Implementing Customer Focus in Enterprises

Sandra VandermerwePalgrave MacmillanISBN 1403935033£25

Presumably most organisations want to create a stronger customer focus. This book is certainly for those who do. It is intended as a guide to customer-centric change. Its form is as a “project plan” working through the five stages that the author suggests represent the path to this common goal of customer focus.

These five (simple) steps are:

1. 1.

   the Awakening;

2. 2.

   the Discovery;

3. 3.

   the Story;

4. 4.

   the Engagement; and

5. 5.

   the Reward.

The author works through these stages by bringing together distinctive and cutting edge work based upon her own research and work with leading companies in the overlapping areas of strategy, marketing and innovation.

Of course, though the goal might be a “soft” goal – and something of a “motherhood and apple pie” goal at that – the importance is in the results that such an approach delivers. In an environment of increasing competition and falling margins the model shows how to increase value to customers and improve business results.