Magnetic Service: Secrets of Creating Passionately Devoted Customers - Hardcover

Bell, Chip R; Bell, Bilijack R

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9781576752364: Magnetic Service: Secrets of Creating Passionately Devoted Customers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1576752364 ISBN 13: 9781576752364

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003

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The ideal customer defends, champions, forgives, and commits to a company or brand for the long term - but how can a business create such long-lasting loyalty? Chip and Bilijack Bell explain how in Magnetic Service, based on examples of real companies who have done just that. Written in a lively, accessible style, the book shows that loyalty comes not from allegiance to a product but from compelling experiences. Using case studies, the authors explain the concept of ""magnetic service"" that turns casual customers into loyal and enduring fans. The book unlocks the seven secrets of this phenomenon, from ""Focus on Customer Hopes, Not Just Needs"" to ""Add 'Charisma' to the Mix"" to ""Empower Customers Through Comfort.""

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About the Author:

Chip R. Bell is a senior partner with The Chip Bell Group and manages their headquarters office near Dallas, Texas. His consulting practice focuses on helping organizations to build a culture that supports long- term customer devotion. Prior to starting a consulting firm in the late 1970s, he was director of management and organization development for NCNB, now Bank of America.
Chip is the author or co-author of fifteen books, including Service Magic: How to Amaze Your Customers (with Ron Zemke); Customer Love: Attracting and Keeping Customers for Life; Customers As Partners: Building Relationships That Last; Managers As Mentors: Building Partnerships For Learning; Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service (with Ron Zemke); Dance Lessons: Six Steps to Great Partnerships in Business and Life (with Heather Shea); and Beep-Beep!: Competing in the Age of the Road Runner (with Oren Harari). His work has been featured on CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg TV, NPR, Voice of America, and Reuters and in the Wall Street Journal; Fortune; USA Today; Entre- preneur Magazine; Inc. Magazine; Business Week; and Bottom Line Business.
Chip has served as a consultant, keynote speaker, or trainer to such major organizations as IBM, Microsoft, General Electric, Royal Bank, Marriott, Pfizer, Sears, Merrill Lynch, Ritz-Carlton, 3M, USAA, Aurora Health, Lockheed-Martin, Harley-Davidson, Honda, MBNA, Bank of
167America, Universal Studios, Pepsi, AAA, Duke Energy, and Victoria’s Secret. He was a highly decorated infantry unit commander with the elite 82nd Airborne in Vietnam. Chip is married to Nancy Rainey Bell, a school administrator and attorney.
Bilijack R. Bell is a commercial real estate professional with Wilson, Hull & Neal in Atlanta. With eight years in commercial real estate, he has a solid reputation for highly creative approaches to client service. That reputation has earned him membership in both the prestigious President’s Club as well as the Million Dollar Club. His service articles have appeared in such publications as Realtor Magazine, Staff Digest, Executive Excellence, and Midas Matters.
Bilijack is a graduate of Elon College in Burlington, North Carolina, where he majored in history. He was a member of the 1989 U.S. Ambassador Soccer team and competed throughout Europe. Bilijack is married to Lisa Dickinson Bell, a middle school teacher in the Atlanta area.

There are people who gleefully pay five bucks for a cup of Starbucks coffee, gratefully pay hundreds of dollars to stay at a Ritz-Carlton Hotel, and loyally spend twenty-five grand for a Harley-Davidson motorcycle they wait a year to get! Where’s the logic? Customer devotion launches rational economics straight into the stratosphere.

Devotion to Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, or Harley-Davidson is not about a beverage, a hotel room, or transportation. It’s about an experience—an experience as profound and unmistakable as a teenager under the sway of first love. Granted, the product or outcome must be good, but it need not necessarily be great. Harley devotees grudgingly acknowledge that there really are technologically better bikes, but neither Suzuki nor BMW can match the gratification a Harley owner feels on a Sunday afternoon ride with other loyalists. Devotion springs from something other than simply the quality of the product.

Customers who are devoted to your internal unit or organization act substantially different than the customers who are simply loyal. The passionately devoted customer not only forgives you when you err but actually helps you correct what caused the mistake. They don’t just recommend you; they assertively insist that their friends do business with you. They vehemently defend you when others are critical; and even if the reason for the criticism is accurate, they quickly dismiss it as an aberration or an exception.

But there is even more to devotion. Some devoted customers of Harley-Davidson tattoo the company logo on their bodies. Devoted guests of Ritz-Carlton wear the hotel's logoed clothes and have Ritz-Carlton cobalt-blue accessories in their homes. Devotion is a connection that becomes a part of the customer’s identity and life expression.

The goal of Magnetic Service is to create an experience so compelling that it allures or draws the customer back, time and time again. Figuring out the components that give rise to passionate devotion is not a simple process. There is clearly a psycho-logic to appeal. Color, shape, sound and touch form an intricate pattern in the brain that links with learned preferences and spells attraction. There is also a social component at work. Somehow, privately watching the Green Bay Packers in the living room is not the same as elbowing your way through the bleachers with two hotdogs and cold beer. But organizations can’t turn on a tape of a cheering mob or flood the store with the smell of motorcycle exhaust every time their customers enter the office, store, or department.

The authors' discovery of the seven powerful secrets of magnetic service came through a study of several "cult-like" brands—those organizations that had a very large share of customers who behaved like groupies. They studied companies as diverse as USAA Insurance, Universal Studios, Ritz-Carlton Hotels, the "best in the world" Mansion at Turtle Creek Hotel and Restaurant, Sewell Village Cadillac, and Harley-Davidson Motor Company. Additionally, they interviewed managers, frontline employees, and some of the most devoted customers of such well-known brands as Marriott, Merrill Lynch, American Honda, ReMax, Pfizer, Holiday Inn, MBNA, Victoria’s Secret, and Aurora Health Care.

In this study, the authors found patterns or practices that seemed to yield customer devotion. They distilled these patterns and practices into the seven secrets for creating passionately devoted customers that serve as the building blocks for this book.

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