Awards

Awards

Butler was recognized as a best practices company in a benchmarking study "Using What Customers Value to Guide your Business," published by APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center), "Innovative Performance Award" a non-profit organization and world-renowned resource for process and improvement for organizations of all sizes across all industries. Along with Butler, the study also recognized AT&T, Nortel Networks, Hewlett-Packard and WesTrac Equipment, an Australian distributor of Caterpillar equipment.

Each of the five companies have all found innovative ways to effectively use customer value analysis and have made customer value a key factor for decision-making throughout their organizations. According to Dr. Bradley Gale, study adviser, president of Customer Value, Inc., and author of Managing Customer Value: Creating Quality and Service that Customers Can See, "Superior customer value is the best leading indicator of market share and competitiveness. And market share and competitiveness in turn drive the achievement of long-term financial goals such as profitability, growth and shareholder value."

In studying these successful companies over a five month period by conducting site visits and collecting data via a detailed questionnaire, APQC identified several key best-practices to help guide other organizations in adopting a customer value program.

One of the most important keys to successful, rapid implementation of a companywide CVA (Customer Value Analysis) system is strong support from the CEO. All of the best-practice companies in the study note that it is key to achieve buy-in at the top to start, maintain, and communicate a successful customer value analysis program. Hewlett-Packard and Butler are examples of CVA systems with exceptional CEO involvement.

In addition, CVM (Customer Value Management) provides best-practice organizations with an overarching strategic framework that is used to tie customer satisfaction and transactional studies together to become supporting studies for a customer value framework. Along with Hewlett-Packard and AT&T, Butler's customer value analysis is a formalized extension of its customer satisfaction process. CVA provides a competitive profile and has made Butler a more customer-centric organization...

View Butler's case study for more information on the key best-practices. More information about APQC can be found at http://www.apqc.org