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  3. There Are No Products—Only Services Take a step beyond "total quality" and "customer satisfaction". There’s a new view of th

There Are No Products—Only Services Take a step beyond "total quality" and "customer satisfaction". There’s a new view of th

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问题               There Are No Products—Only Services
    Take a step beyond "total quality" and "customer satisfaction". There’s a new view of the relationship between suppliers and customers. The idea, as put by Rosabeth Moss Katner of the Harvard Business School: Think of every product you buy or sell as a service. In other words, look at what it does not what it is.
    That way, selling a product becomes only one of your opportunities to do something for your customers. Many companies are now offering additional services, particularly after-sales services, to increase the value of their products. This practice, often referred to as "bundling, "is an effective way to keep in contact with customers. Look at Toyota’s Lexus. Thanks to a partnership with IBM, Lexus tracks every car on a national computer—your sedan’s complete maintenance history is available to every dealer from Miami to Seattle. Why? Because Lexus doesn’t want its relationship with you to end at the showroom door.
    At packaging Corp. of America, employees say they offer packaging solutions, not just packaging. Monte Hayman, a CEO, says: "It used to be that we made a product and looked for people to buy it. Then we started doing research to learn what the market wanted, and developed product for that. Today we’re working with individual customers."
    Then there’s unbundling, When you want to offer more products and services, but it isn’t within your means to produce them yourself, you might decide to contract out stuff that you would never have let out of your sight before. IBM no longer handles its own warehousing. Two years ago it junked 21 parts warehouses in favour of half-a-dozen outside vendors.
    Commodore Business Machines goes further: In November it unbundled virtually all of its after-sales services for consumer products. Its partner is a new division of Federal Express called Business Logistics Services, Fed Ex mans a 24-hour help line for Commodore. If your computer needs to go to the shop, Fed Ex will pick it up the morning after you call, drop off a replacement, and often do the repairs at its Memphis hub. Customers never know they’re dealing with Fed Ex employees, except for the delivery man. After a six-month trial, says Jim Reeder, Commodore’s vice president for customer satisfaction, his company is offering better service at half the previous cost.
    This kind of collaboration is replacing competition in relationships with suppliers. Experts at the Cresap consulting firm call it "supplier integration". It elevates outsourcing from a mere cost-cutting measure to the level of strategy. The new goal is a win-win alliance, where suppliers get the security of a long-term relationship and customers get more say over their upstream processes.
    Companies that think of the products,they buy and sell as services can also discover new ways to market existing products. as Xerox did when it redefined its copier machine business as document processing. They study such questions as whether to share a single system to track purchase orders. There is a new slogan: "Suppliers and customers—one system, not two systems."  
What does the sentence "Today we’re working with individual customers." in the third paragraph mean?
选项 A、It means the company employs customers as its employees.
B、It means the company makes a product and looks for one customer to test it.
C、It means the company develops a product after doing research.
D、It means the company knows more about what customers want by providing additional services.
答案D
解析 题目意为：“第三段中的’Today we’re working with Individual customers, 这句话是什么意思?”本段引用了美国一家包装公司首席执行官的一段话，此引语的第一句和第二句的意为：“…过去我们制造出一种产品，然后寻找买家。”现在我们是先做调研了解市场的需求，然后再去研发产品。因此，通过引语中的第一句和第二句可以推断D项“通过附加服务项目，公司更加了解消费者所需”为正确答案。
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