Strategic Customer Care: An Evolutionary Approach to Increasing Customer Value and Profitability

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.

For Stanley Brown, customers are companies, not individuals. This
assumption rapidly narrows the market for the book—those working in
small business can take a pass.

The book’s strength is Brown’s innovative structure for analyzing
the stages in the customer-development operation. He sees a business as
going through five stages: customer information and profiling,
segmentation, research, technology investment, and customer management.
Using this structure as a framework, Brown looks at the relationship of
the corporation to its customers in terms of quantity, quality, and
profitability. The core lesson is that not all customers are equal in
their contribution to the bottom line, and that identifying the top
customers and acting to secure their loyalty and retention is therefore
what business is all about.

The book is packed with jargon; it’s old-home week for readers of the
business press, with terms like “best practices,” “gap
analysis,” “customer alignment,” and “performance monitoring”
rolling in at every chapter. Acronyms, too, pepper the pages. LOB as
shorthand for “line of business” is a comfortable oldie, but surely
we could have been spared VOC (voice of the customer) and CBC (customer
buying centre).

In case anyone missed the point that customer care has nothing to do
with caring for customers but everything to do with their potential as
purchasers, Brown’s process builds toward acquiring the key data for
analysis: “the size of the customer’s wallet” and “wallet
expansion.” At least he earns high points for honesty.

Strategic Customer Care is thick with theory and short on examples, and
Brown writes in a dry-bones lecture style. The result: reading this book
is an endurance test.