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Book Description

Businesses worry about new technologies, but customers are the ultimate disruptors—Suman Sarkar offers bold strategies for making sure you understand your customers and keep up with their ever-changing needs.

Disruption—the brutal roiling of markets, the decline of long-established brands and products, and the rise of new upstarts—drives business failure and success. Most people think technology causes disruption, but technology merely enables it. Changing customer needs cause disruptions, and too many businesses get caught unaware.
Suman Sarkar offers proven strategies that will enable any business to stay radically close to its customers and address their evolving needs. He argues that businesses need to focus on existing customers first—research shows they're likely to spend more and are more profitable than new customers. Personalization is becoming important for the newer generations in both developed and developing markets, so Sarkar describes approaches to make them cost-effective. In our era of instant gratification, customers want what they want now—Sarkar explains how you can develop and deliver products and services faster than ever. And since a few bad Yelp reviews, social media posts, or angry tweets from customers can ruin you, Sarkar shows how to proactively make sure the quality of your products and services stays better than that of your competitors.
The key to survival in this era of changing customer needs is to focus on and address them quickly so customers don't switch to the competition. Drawing on his experiences with leading companies worldwide, Sarkar offers five strategies and techniques that will keep you ahead of the curve.

Table of Contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Introduction: Disruption Myth
    1. New Strategies for Disruption
    2. Focus
  8. 1. Customers Drive Disruption
    1. Focus on Customer Needs, Not What’s Articulated
    2. Recognize That Customer Needs Vary by Country and Geography
    3. Generational Changes Will Drive Future Disruptions
    4. How Generational Changes Affect Businesses
    5. Realizing That Technology and Innovation Do Not Disrupt Companies
    6. Disconnect between Customer Needs and Technology Development
    7. Walmart Versus Amazon
  9. 2. Customer-Focused Strategies Needed to Avoid Disruption
    1. Why Companies Don’t Focus on Customers
    2. Failure of Current Business Strategies
    3. New Customer-Focused Strategies Are Needed to Avoid Disruption
    4. Successful Turnarounds
  10. 3. Customer-Focus Strategy 1: Win with Current Customers Before Chasing After New Ones
    1. Getting Current Customers to Spend More
    2. Increasing Service Levels without Ruining Yourself
    3. Increasing Revenue Profitably
    4. Getting Existing Customers to Spend More
  11. 4. Customer-Focus Strategy 2: Personalization Is Not a Luxury
    1. The Personalization Revolution
    2. Personalization Then and Now
    3. How to Deliver Affordable Personalization
    4. Making Affordable Personalization a Reality
  12. 5. Customer-Focus Strategy 3: Customers Won’t Wait
    1. Introduce New Products or Services Quickly
    2. After Launch, Plan for Quick Scaling to Keep Up with Demand
    3. Create the Right Service Model
    4. How to Respond Faster to Changing Customer Needs
    5. Responding Faster to Customer Needs
  13. 6. Customer-Focus Strategy 4: Good Enough Is No Longer Good Enough
    1. Step 1: Focus on Quality, Now
    2. Step 2: Set Standards That Customers Can’t Resist
    3. Step 3: Optimize Manufacturing for Quality, Not Output
    4. Step 4: Don’t Be Afraid to Challenge Industry Norms
    5. Step 5: Think Supply Chain
    6. Winning with Quality
  14. 7. Customer-Focus Strategy 5: Disregard Strategies 1 Through 4
    1. Understanding Future Customer Needs and Developing Strategies for Them
    2. Empowering Teams
    3. Paying Attention to Detail
    4. Business Reinvention
  15. Conclusion: Choosing and Implementing the Strategies
    1. Selecting the Right Customer-Focused Strategies
    2. Changing Organization Perspective
    3. Societal Implications
  16. Appendix: Disruption Assessment
  17. Notes
  18. Acknowledgments
  19. Index
  20. About the Author
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