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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

admin2012-01-22  101
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."  
Which of the following is NOT the method adopted by a company when it couldn’t produce the products and services needed by the market?
选项 A、Hiring other companies to supply the separate services offered in its service package
B、Working with other suppliers together to offer consumers more services
C、Discovering new ways to market its existing products
D、Cutting the cost in producing process
答案D
解析 题目意为：“当公司不能生产或提供市场需要的产品和服务时，以下哪项不属于公司应采取的办法?”文中第四段到第七段举例说明了公司想要扩大市场份额时的几种做法。A、B、C项在这些段落中均已提到，分别为“外包业务”，“供应商整合”，以及“找到推销现有产品的新方法”。D项意为“减少生产过程中的成本”。虽然符合常识，但文中未提及，因此正确答案为D。
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