Harvard Business School Book Report

For decades the business world has come to adopt a more customer-centered approach toward marketing and product development. Author John McKean, a consultant and lecturer, breaks this evolution into four areas:

1. Before the 1980s, customers were treated as a homogeneous group.

2. During the 1980s, customers became a prime focus of business.

3. In the 1990s, customers were recognized as individuals.

4. Since 2000, customers have been recognized as people.

Treating people as human beings, not as organisms that make purchases, now attracts much of the attention in the business world, especially marketing. Yet we tend to think of “human touch” marketing as an art rather than a science. In Customers as People, McKean aims to “establish the art of humanness as a firm-wide science to create a unanimous and consistent human touch across every interaction.”

To establish a customer-friendly business, the battle begins on the front lines with your employees, who must develop a “human touch competency” that creates “a feeling of acknowledgement, respect, and trust” in every customer. Of course, you must give your employees the same respect that you would want them to shower onto their customers.

Other issues addressed in this book include: building a business-wide “human culture,” effective customer communication and interaction, processes that encompass the human touch, and using technology to humanize rather than dehumanize.

In sum, this book intends to be a practical guide with plenty of specifics and concrete suggestions. Author McKean also weaves in words of wisdom from observers on the human condition from Erasmus to Franklin D. Roosevelt. —Poping Lin