Henley Centre for Customer Management

The Henley Centre for Customer Management (previously called Henley Management College) is a department of the University of Reading that offers executive education. It is run by Henley Business School, which numbers among its past clients Microsoft, Shell, the UK and foreign governments, and non–governmental bodies including the United Nations.

Here is its description on the University of Reading website:

The Henley Centre for Customer Management, under the directorship of Professor Moira Clark, provides a genuine opportunity to harness the forward thinking that could put you ahead of your competition. It brings together business practitioners, industry thought- leaders and experts/academics to help organisations to tackle today's business challenges through an ongoing programme of workshops and highly focused research projects. The primary goal of the Henley Centre for Customer Management is to promote Customer Focus and Service Excellence best practice. It does this by observing practice in leading companies and synthesising this into useful knowledge that helps members to improve their own Customer Management and Customer Service plans and implementations. This aligns with the aim of Henley Business School to deliver high quality contributions to thought leadership, through research into the management of organisations.

History

Henley Management College, also called The Management College at Henley, was founded in 1946. The College is the longest established management school in Europe and an article about it in Management Research News (1982) calls it "the seed-bed for many developments in management education in the U.K. and the rest of the world." It also states, "Many thousands of senior managers from industry, commerce, financial institutions and the public service and from all over the world have attended Henley courses."

The article describes the founding of the college as follows:

Henley was conceived by a group of concerned people who felt the need significantly to improve business management and public administration, largely as an outcome of the traumatic experiences of the Great Depression of the late '20s and early '30s. Their ideas became crystallised during the years of the Second World War. They were impressed by the growing size and complexity of organisation in business and the public service and felt that quality of management would be the crucial factor after the war.

People

• Prof Moira Clark - director

Funding

The Henley Centre for Customer Management is sponsored by Vertex, an international business process outsourcer specialising in customer management.

Members

As of 2008:

• Vertex
• 3M UK Ltd
• Bausch & Lomb
• Balfour Beatty
• Carphone Warehouse
• Cisco Systems
• Cognizant Technology Solutions
• The Cooperative Financial Services
• Defence Science and Technology Laboratory
• Ecclesiastical Insurance Group
• GlaxoSmithKline
• Kelly Services

Affiliations

Henley Management College appears to be the same place as the Henley Centre for Customer Management, as they share the same address, below.

Resources

• Henley: The Management College Management Research News Year: 1982 Volume: 5 Issue: 2 Page: 18 - 21 ISSN: 0140-9174 DOI: 10.1108/eb027805 Publisher: MCB UP Ltd
• http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=N0b2nAeTymwC&q=Henley#v=snippet&q=Henley&f=false
• http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=fYTNGAAACAAJ&dq=henley+management+college+history&lr=&ei=stGbSpS-FoLskQSviMVz

Contact

Address: Henley Business School, Greenlands, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire RG9 3AU, UK