The Customer Delight Principle : Exceeding Customers' Expectations for Bottom-Line Success - Hardcover

Timothy L. Keiningham; Terry Vavra

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0658010042 ISBN 13: 9780658010040

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 2001

Synopsis

Here's how your company can take customer satisfaction to a new level and reap the profits!

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The Customer Delight Principle shows how customer delight -- not mere satisfaction -- drives repeat purchasing and customer loyalty. The book details how your company can build a customer delight-oriented organization and reveals many of the roadblocks that you are likely to encounter. How to monitor customer delight results, including measurement and validation against revenue, is covered, as is formulating payback curves for a customer delight investment, allocating resources for continued customer delight improvements, and the continued benchmarking of results.

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• Statistics show that customer satisfaction alone is not enough. Over 60% of customers lost by companies have reported that they were at least "satisfied," in their experience with the company .
• Striving for more than customer satisfaction is a key strategy in Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM), the predominant marketing approach of today's most successful traditional and dot-com companies..

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About this title

From the Back Cover:

Techniques to Move Your Customers Beyond Mere Satisfaction--at Every Point of Contact

Global competition today is fierce, and customers who are merely satisfied with your company's products or services will soon be lured away by your competition. The Customer Delight Principle reveals how today's leading marketers consistently retain and grow their customer bases by moving beyond satisfaction to discover and fill each customer's unseen yet essential needs. Comprehensive in scope yet focused in treatment, this book reveals how to dramatically increase your organization's positive customer experiences, virtually eliminate the negative, and drive your customers to new levels of repeat purchasing, loyalty, and sheer delight.

Praise for The Customer Delight Principle

"Customer satisfaction should no longer be the goal of a service organization. In the new economy, what matters is customer retention and the bottom line. The Customer Delight Principle shows us how."
--Patrick Zacchea, Vice President, Van Kampen Funds

"Keiningham and Vavra raise the aspirations for customer satisfaction for all with the perspective of achieving customer delight. The concept is explained clearly using brand experiences almost all of us have surely had."
--George Stalk, Senior Vice President, The Boston Consulting Group, Editor, Breaking Compromises

"The Customer Delight Principle is a provocative and compelling read."
--Ross Goodwin, Corporate Customer Loyalty Manager, Hewlett-Packard Company

"Numerous studies have shown that anywhere from 60 percent to 85 percent of customers who switch firms would have been classified as satisfied according to conventional analytic procedures. With The Customer Delight Principle we hope to alert the business community to the pitfalls of managing for improved satisfaction. Organizations that understand our principles and manage accordingly will succeed."
--From the Preface

In today's Web-shopping, brand-hopping, global competitive environment, customers expect satisfaction. But too often, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in customer satisfaction measurement programs lead managers to blame themselves--as opposed to poor underlying models--for failure to promote positive changes and improved results.

The Customer Delight Principle presents a step-by-step program for taking your company further up the customer satisfaction continuum, from a reliance on the satisfaction-maintaining characteristics that customers increasingly take for granted to a focus on unexpected, customer delight-creating attributes. Renowned customer retention consultants and thought leaders Timothy Keiningham and Terry Vavra unveil a customer delight principle based not on wishful thinking and outdated research but instead on current real-world findings that include:

• Perceived costs of negative outcomes to a customer, and how they far outweigh the perceived benefit from expected outcomes
• The nonlinear relationship between perceived performance and customer satisfaction, in which customer attitude changes follow a classic diminishing-returns model
• Case studies of FedEx Customer Critical, Toys "R" Us, Mercedes-Benz USA, and others on determining the "delight-creating" attributes of a product or service, then concentrating performance-improvement efforts in those areas

Satisfied customers are good for business success--just not good enough. Follow the steps outlined in The Customer Delight Principle to construct an innovative customer delight program for your own company, one designed to drive repeat purchasing and customer loyalty, along with bottom-line profit and value growth.

About the Author:

Timothy Keiningham is senior vice president at Marketing Metrics, Inc., a global research and consulting firm that specializes in customer satisfaction measurement, customer retention program design and execution, marketing research services, and training seminars. He is the author of Return On Quality and Service Marketing.

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Terry Vavra, Ph.D., is the cofounder and president of Marketing Metrics, Inc. A world-renowned authority in customer retention strategies, Dr. Vavra has designed retention programs for leading international companies including Digital Equipment, GTE, and IBM Consulting Companies. He is the author of Aftermarketing and Improving Your Measurement of Customer Satisfaction, and has written numerous articles for Journal of Marketing Research, Journaling of Marketing, Marketing News, and other professional publications.

About this edition

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0658010042
• ISBN 13: 9780658010040
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208