satisfaction moves beyond the fundamental tenets of Total Quality Management (TQM), which began some 25 years or more ago to stress the necessity of doing more than merely meeting customer requirements and expectations (Stahl, 1995). TQM in action demonstrated that "customer value" does not consist solely of eliminating product defects; rather, customer value was recognized in the TQM organizational framework as having many dimensions which must be systematically determined in the firm's products and services. Customer-value determination systems were created in quality-driven organizations to garner input from customers that was translated into product or service refinement, modification and development (Stahl, 1995).
What Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000) propose moves dramatically beyond enhanced customer value and satisfaction via quality management. In the diversified organization, managers began some time ago to regard the company as a collection of (possibly) interlinked competencies. Today, customers as a group and as individuals have become another valuable source of competence that can be harnessed to acquire and retain competitive advantages. Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2000) identify four critical tasks that managers must perform to make use of customer competence:
1) encouraging an active, explicit and ongoing dialogue which positions customer and organization as equals;
2) mobilizing customer communities;
3) managing customer diversity; and,
4) cocreating personalized experiences in which customers are active participants in shaping the products that they will then purchase.
To achieve these goals, companies "must create opportunities for customers to experiment with and then decide the level of involvement they want in creating a given experience with a company (Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2000).
Multiple channels of intelligence gathering, interaction, distribution, and communication are clearly n...