Books
Please let us know if there are other books you think should be added to this list.
The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth
Fred Reichheld
Harvard Business School Press
The Ultimate Question refers to the conclusion that Fred Reiccheld came to in his work with Satmetrix and Bain & Co. when exploring key drivers of profitability. They discovered that 1) customer loyalty is the key driver of profits and 2) the key indicator of loyalty is how willing customers are to refer you to others. This book introduces the concept of Net Promoter Score® (NPS) and shares case studies of many organizations who were part of their study. This concept is controversial but thousands of organizations worldwide are embracing this approach to keeping a finger on the pulse of what is most important in their organizations.
Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business
Richard Owen, Laura L. Brooks PhD, Jossey Bass
This book, by two experts who were involved in developing the original Net Promoter Score® methodology, helps provide concrete tips on how to implement NPS in your organization and shares more case studies about what other organizations have learned in the process.
Know thy Customer: How to Follow Marketing’s First Commandment
Kevin Sharp & Daniel Johnson
The Dartnell Corporation
Whether you’re a marketing manager, a customer service manager, or anyone involved with — and affected by – customer satisfaction, “Know Thy Customer!” should be your first resource to answering the ongoing question of how to monitor the health of the customer relationship in order to deliver better and more consistent service and satisfaction – to your customers and co-workers throughout your company!
Know Your Customer: New Approaches to Understanding Customer Value and Satisfaction
Robert B. Woodruff, Sarah Gardial
Blackwell Publications
The authors provide some unique approaches to better understanding the path from satisfied customers to those that truly value you. They provide a framework for interviewing customers that allows the supplier to gain insight on how the customer has made supplier choices in the past. This enable the supplier to create the right product / service attributes that the customer will pay for.
Cracking the Value Code: How Successful Businesses Are Creating Wealth in the New Economy
Harper Business
New Economy success stories like Charles Schwab, Microsoft, and the Gap have outstripped their older industrial-age counterparts because they have devised new business models that hook into “what matters” to customers. How? By using their organizational assets — both concrete and intangible — as the building blocks to true customer value.
Customers for Life: How to Turn That One-Time Buyer into a Lifetime Customer
Carl Sewell, Tom Peters, Paul B. Brown
Pocket Books
Carl Sewell’s proven methods can help entrepreneurs turn their employees into service superstars, develop effective advertising, and, most importantly, keep customers coming back for more.
The Wow Factory: Creating a Customer Focus Revolution in Your Business
Paul Levesque
Irwin Professional Publications
This eye-opening book introduces customer focus as a decision that every person in the organization will make, everyday. Author Paul Levesque provides the readers with both the reason and the method for injecting the “wow” factor into their most routine customer transactions, regardless of whether their business is a one – person operation or a multinational corporation.
Loyalty.com: Customer Relationship Management in the New Era of Internet Marketing
Frederick Newell
McGraw-Hill
To develop loyalty from customers with a world of choices at their fingertips requires a brand-new kind of skill and ingenuity. This book provides specific, easy-to-implement techniques to create and implement cost-effective and result-driven CRM (Customer Relationship Management) strategies.
The Customer Revolution: How to Thrive When Customers Are in Control
Patricia Seybold
Crown Business
It used to be that developing customer relationships in a mass-market economy didn’t matter. All a successful company had to do was make products that people generally liked — build it and they would come. Patricia Seybold thinks those days are long gone. Thanks to the Internet, customers matter more than ever, and companies that don’t get it simply won’t make it. In The Customer Revolution she writes, “For the first time in the history of modern business, it’s now cost-effective for companies to establish relationships with each and every customer who wants us to know him.”
Customer Loyalty: How to Earn It; How to Keep It
Jill Griffin, Jossey Bass
Studies show that customer satisfaction does not equate with continued sales–it is the “loyal” customer who resists the competitor’s tempting offers. This pragmatic guide outlines a savvy, seven-step process for turning prospects into customers and customers into loyal advocates.
Turning Lost Customers Into Gold… and the Art of Achieving Zero Defections
Joan Koob Cannie
AMACOM
The average company loses 20% of its customers a year. But most managers don’t realize that retaining a mere 5% of these defectors could boost profits by 25% to 100% — because loyal customers spend more, refer new customers, and are less costly to do business with. This follow-up to Keeping Customers for Life spells out an exciting new approach to understanding customer expectations and providing products and services they truly value.
The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value
James L. Heskett, W. Earl Sasser, Jr, Leonard A. Schlesinger
Free Press
This book pounds home how of profits are possible in successful long-term customer relationships. Marketers may fear the coming of the customer-centric organization, since many processes and functions will be turned upside down in a new kind of reengineering. Employees, however, will rejoice, since the front line is the key to unlocking customer satisfaction.
