Connected Strategy ― Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage

The Internet of Things, robo investment advisers, wearable fitness devices, remote health care operations . . . business executives in many industries are currently being inundated with a confusingly and exhaustingly broad range of technological developments that enable new business models.

There is, however, a common thread among all of these developments: firms are fundamentally changing how they connect with their customers. Rather than having occasional, episodic interactions--where customers realize they have an unmet need and then look for ways to fill it--firms are striving to be continuously connected to their customers, providing services and products as the needs arise, even before customers become aware of them.

Firms such as Nike, Disney, Progressive Insurance, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, Medtronic, Hewlett-Packard, and Tesco are developing and competing on connected strategies: creating superior customer experiences through connectivity while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiencies and reshaping their industries.

Strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies across a broad array of industries and show how these strategies work, how they eliminate the trade-off between superior customer experience and low cost, and how companies can formulate, design, and implement them. In showing how to create a connected strategy, the authors reveal the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offerings, coaching, and automatic execution--for turning occasional, episodic interactions into continuous relationships. Siggelkow and Terwiesch show you how to:

• Reshape the connections between customers, suppliers, and your firm
• Create the right revenue model
• Make the best technology choices to support your strategy

Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating connected relationships with your customers and redefining the connections in your industry.

Nicolaj Siggelkow is the David M. Knott Professor at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as codirector of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. His current research focuses on the strategic and organizational implications of interactions among a firm's choices of activities and resources, and how firms create connected strategies to transform their customer relationships and how these strategies, in turn, transform industries. Christian Terwiesch is the Andrew M. Heller Professor at the Wharton School in the Operations, Information and Decisions department, as well as codirector of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. He also holds a faculty appointment in Penn's Perelman School of Medicine. He is the coauthor of Matching Supply with Demand, a widely used textbook in operations management that was the basis for the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) in business on Coursera. Over 250,000 students have enrolled in this course. His book, Innovation Tournaments (published by Harvard Business Press), presents a novel approach to innovation that was featured by BusinessWeek, the Financial Times, and Sloan Management Review and has led to innovation tournaments in organizations around the world. He does research with and consults for various organizations, from small startups to Fortune 500 companies. Most of his current consulting relates to healthcare and the use of technology to transform patient relationships and cost structures.

Author social media/website info:
Nicolaj Siggelkow: linkedin.com/in/nicolajsiggelkow, nicolajsiggelkow.com/about/
Christian Terwiesch: twitter.com/terwiesch?lang=en