Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Connected Strategy, Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage. Available from Amazon here. See more book reviews here.

Connected Strategy reviewed

Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships

What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships–while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost?

This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity–involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions–mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency.

In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways–respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution–for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies.

Whether you’re trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you:

• Reshape your connections with your customers
• Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity
• Create the right revenue model
• Make the best technology choices to support your strategy

Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of “workshop chapters” throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.

You now have the data at your finger tips, with so many digital touch points through out your whole selling process. If you don’t make the most of the potential information and business advantages it offers you, then your rivals surely will. If this is something that you are already aware of, then the next question is how are you gathering your own business intelligence, and how are you applying it. This book reflects a good, current state of play, summary of what is possible, what might be possible, and what will almost certainly very soon be possible. It may feel like you are having to run still to keep up with the Joneses. But if you don’t, in these faster moving times, you will be left behind and in an era of small margins, inactive and  non proactive behaviour could be the decisive factor in allowing your rivals to build an unsurmountable lead over you.

It is now a fast moving industry, and this book’s recommendations may hold much less value in five years time, but at the moment you have little to lose by spending the time reading and considering their suggestions. Think about how you like to be treated when you engage with other businesses, and which ones leave you satisfied or otherwise. Then ask yourself how you would feel if you were having to deal with your own sales team. Those who are able to look self reflectively, openly, and critically at these experiences and objectively assess whether their own processes suck or soar will do far better than those who continue to operate in a certain way, solely because that is how things have always been done in the company.

If this topic is relevant to you, then you have nothing to lose by reading this book.

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking