Logistics and Supply Chain Management, 6th Edition

Customer service and customer retention

It will be apparent from what has been said that organisations that compete only on the product’s features will find themselves at a severe disadvantage to those companies that augment the basic product with added-value services. It was one of the leading thinkers in marketing, Theodore Levitt, who first said that ‘people don’t buy products, they buy benefits’.5 The idea behind this statement is that it is the totality of the ‘offer’ that delivers customer value. A simple example would be that a finished product in a warehouse is the same as a finished product in the hands of the customer in terms of its tangible features. Clearly, however, the product in the hands of the customer has far more value than ...