Best Practices: Building Your Business with Customer-Focused Solutions

By Robert Hiebeler, Charles Ketteman, Thomas B. Kelly, et al.

Book Overview

What makes the world's top companies so adept at providing stellar customer service? How do they meet the needs of every customer and still turn healthy profits? And, most important, how can you adapt their practices to fit your business?
Thanks to over six years of ongoing research and an investment of $30 million, Arthur Andersen has created its Global Best Practices Database to uncover breakthrough thinking at world-class companies. Now, in Best Practices, Arthur Andersen for the first time shares its understanding of how more than forty best-practices companies focus on their customers, create growth, reduce cost, and increase profits. Managers of any business in any industry can adapt and apply what those companies do best.
Unlike most books based merely on an author's own theories or limited anecdotal experience, Best Practices is backed up by 30,000 pages of active, documented data on hundreds of companies worldwide. This book concentrates primarily on customers and how to involve them in everything from the design of products and services to marketing, selling, and product delivery.
Perhaps the greatest value of the book lies in its linking of best practices to business processes, thereby encouraging managers to expand their thinking and engage in creative problem-solving with the help of insights from companies inside or outside their own industry For example, the manager of a clothing store chain can study how Federal Express adapted the concept of just-in-time manufacturing to its rapid delivery of parts between supplier and customer. The owner of a small coffee shop chain might learn from American Express and Peapod how to target customers by offering particular products and predicting exactly when they will make their next purchases.
These and other examples will help business people diagnose the processes in place at their own companies and determine how best to improve them. Comprehensive and on the cutting edge, Best Practices will serve as an invaluable information resource.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 068484804X
• ISBN13: 9780684848044
• Release Date: May 2000
• Publisher: Touchstone Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

A Book of Ideas for Creativity & Innovation

A useful text with numerous examples to motivate and encourage your team to get creative and innovative. Useful to owners of small businesses and entrepreneurs to understand how the big organisations succeed. It is little things that could be done for big returns. With the focus on simple things like benchmarking and audit, understanding markets, products and services, it brings all together on winning customers. I have often trawled this book for best practices from time to time and without fail, I have found often new insight and ideas each time I flipped through it. Its a kind of book you may want to read and dip into from time to time for ideas to spark your creativity! The best practice agenda & top ten diagnostic questions at the end of each chapter are useful tools to develop your own best practices.

The book is pregnant with motivating examples

The books quotes numerous examples. That's what the book is all about. Readers may use these as foundation point for implementing best practises in their own companies. Different companies have different situations. These ideas motivate one to perform well, often to surge ahead of the competition. Gives you the adrenaline pump to come out with the best. The importance of value-chain is emphasized by quoting examples of companies such as Lexus which managed continuity of service despite problems in plants of its suppliers. Readers have to be cautioned that this book is not a panacea to customer-service problems. Customer Service is not a mere toll-free number. A reader will realise this and much more by reading this book.

Excellent insight into winning company formulas

No it doesn't take major working capital to build a successful marketing machine. It does require a focus on the details that are important to your customers. Before you squander working capital on fancy advertising campaigns, read this book. Then you will learn that spending your money on product formulation, service and support are the cornerstones to successful marketing. This book provides exceptional real world examples of how to grow a business by focusing on customer service solutions.

Great Lessons from Arthur Andersen's years of experience

An enthusiastic two thumbs up! Unlike most businesss books that say in 300 pages what can be said in 3, this book delivers its message clearly and concisely. It offers many "best practices" learned from direct client experience that can be used immediately in companies. Colored with examples, and punctuated throughout with tidbits of wisdom. A must buy!

Real direction for customer satisfaction

This book truly explains how best practices can be applied to any organization that wants to increase customer satisfaction and revenues. It does this with case studies of some of the leading companies in the world. Enjoyable reading and easy to follow.