What Customers Value Most

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

Although packed with flaws, this book is nonetheless an exceptionally
thorough, practical, guide to the maze known as continuous process
improvement.

First, the flaws. The style is often pompous and always dull. It’s
thick with acronyms, buzzwords, and jargon. There’s no spark, and very
little life. It is so process-oriented it has a process for mapping the
process. Far too many of the examples are American, too few Canadian.

Now for the good stuff—the content. As everyone in business knows,
the object of customer service is not happier customers but more money
(“revenue enhancement”). But that’s okay, as the by-product of
going after more money is better service for customers. Brown faces that
reality and goes on to provide a strong step-by-step guide to the
process of making a business customer-driven. He takes a handful of the
trendiest trends of the 1990s—CPI, JIT, SPC, teams, empowerment,
benchmarking, added value—and pegs them to the performance-improvement
continuum (a buzzword for customer-centred). This gives a nice sense of
order and logic to the parts, making the whole a lot more appealing.

Some particularly interesting sections include the material on mission
statements (great examples), the scorecard to help leaders evaluate
their own level of achievement in the customer-centred challenge, a
comparison of ISO9000 and the Baldridge Award, and a really clear
explanation of best practices and competitive benchmarking. A section on
the dubious practice of creating a crisis to justify change will draw
fire. There are a few examples of exceptional service and a strong
chapter on teams—how to form them and what they need to succeed.

Although those outside business-consultant circles may wish the book
had been translated into English before it was published (there is a
glossary for do-it-yourselfers), anyone struggling to understand the
essence of re-engineering will find Brown’s work of value.