Lean Customer Engagement.

Swaminathan, Freda

Lean Customer Engagement by Shil Niyogi, Sage Publications India Pvt.Ltd, Delhi, 2016, Pages 179, Price Rs. 350/--

Acknowledging the importance of the customer, Niyogi has written a practical guidebook, "without wasting effort in unnecessary sales and marketing activities", to develop successful businesses through an engaged customer base. Niyogi shows that he is a typical Marketing person by basing his book on a framework to maximize output from every customer, called Four E's, being Educate, Enable, Effect and Engage. The author calls this framework an Engagement zone which is dynamic in nature. Each E consists of the following:

Educate : Research, Value and Needs, Market Suitability, Adaptability, Drive, Strategic Perspective, Product Design, Informing customers.

Enable: Lead qualification Knowing customers, categorizing customers, pricing, brand and product design, advertising reach and logistics.

Effect: Listening, long term solutions, customer retention, managing delivery, rules and tools engagement and revisiting purpose.

Engage : Sales Forecasting, opportunity hunting, storytelling, using data, benchmarking, trust and decision mapping.

The author demonstrates in his book, through his vast experience of product development and project development, especially in smaller businesses the importance of customer satisfaction and the ability to partner with customers. He shows how being a lean machine where costs are kept low not only helps an organization, but results in customer engagement. In the process laid out by the author, the education phase gives tools to reach out to current and prospective customer needs. The enabling phase takes this further to identifying leads and potential customers. The 'effect' and 'engage' phases are strategic in nature and results in better planning for customer engagement.

The engaging zone conceived in the book recognizes the rise of the digital age. The framework also looks at the need to prolong the maturity phase of a product life cycle and prevent its decline. The need to build value, in light of a maximum value point, and regularly reinvent these zones has been emphasized, in keeping with customer's changing needs. The format of the book is useful for entrepreneurs, small businesses, professionals and academicians.

Freda Swaminathan

Professor,

FORE School of Management, New Delhi.