Title of Book: Creating Customer Evangelists
Author: Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
Publisher: Dearborn Publication
Date: 2003
Pillar of Excellence: Service
What I really liked about this
book: We’ve all read lots of books
about customer or patient satisfaction and customer loyalty. This book takes the concepts a step further
to evangelism. The concepts are simple
to understand and applications in other industries can be drawn easily. Excellent case studies from Southwest
Airlines, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Dallas Mavericks,
O’Reilly & Associates, SolutionPeople and IBM.
I especially liked:
Page 2
- A loyal customer is often defined as one who buys from you on a regular
basis. A repeat customer who purchases
on the basis of convenience or low cost can morph into a vigilante customer,
one who spreads the word about your deplorable service to all who will
listen. Customer evangelism spreads by
word of mouth. It spreads by word of
mouse via e-mail and the Internet.
What
are the attributes of customer evangelists:
The
root of the word evangelist is based on “a bringer of glad tidings.”
Page
4+ - Six tenets of customer evangelism:
(Expanded Pages 179 – 184)
1.
Customer
Plus-Delta: Continuously gather
customer feedback.
·
What
do current customers say that they love about you?
·
What
do they say you should specifically improve?
·
What
do customers value most about your company?
·
Do
customers recommend you to others?
·
What
do customers say when they recommend you to others?
·
Do
you provide easy ways for your customers to regularly provide feedback?
2.
Napsterized
knowledge: Make it a point to share
knowledge freely.
·
Napsterize
parts of your organization, such as sharing intellectual capital and processes,
to make them more valuable. Napsterize
the obvious parts of your business that improve customer interaction or
real-time data. Focus on innovating existing products and services that could
become co-opted by Napsterization or commoditization.
3.
Build
the buzz; Expertly build word-of-mouth networks.
·
Get
people talking by creating buzz about your products and services. Leverage the natural networks in society and
business to break through the clutter with infectious word of mouth.
4.
Create
community: Encourage communities of
customers to meet and share.
·
Help
customers bond with you and each other by adding community programs to your
marketing. Your current customer
evangelists will help recruit new members into the community.
5.
Make
bite-size chunks: Devise specialized,
smaller offerings to get customers to bite.
·
Break
up your product or service portfolio into bite-size chunks, which introduce
your company’s products and services with small, easily consumed pieces. This strategy puts more of your product into
the marketplace for people to experience and evangelize.
6.
Create
a cause: Focus on making the world, or
an industry, better.
·
To
show the world what you are really about, create a cause for your company. A good cause is meaningful; it is something
that people – customers and employees – can believe in and rally around. When people believe in your cause, they’ll
evangelize you to others and recruit new believers into the fold. A cause need not be a charity to which you
donate time or services; a cause can be a point around which your customers and
employees rally – they support it and believe in it. Southwest Airlines and Harley-Davidson have built their company
cultures and marketing strategies around the idea of freedom. No customer every rallied for a company
cause built around the notion of increased shareholder return.
Page
23 – The ten golden rules of Customer Plus-Delta:
1.
Believe
that customers possess good ideas.
2.
Gather
customer feedback at every opportunity.
3.
Focus
on continual improvement.
4.
Actively
solicit good and bad feedback.
5.
Don’t
spend vast sums of money doing it.
6.
Seek
real-time feedback.
7.
Make
it easy for customers to provide their feedback (in person, by e-mail, through
Web sites, at conferences.)
8.
Leverage
technology to aid your efforts.
9.
Share
customer feedback throughout the organization.
10. Use input to make changes – and
communicate changes back to customers.
Page
42 – Buzz includes the multitude of conversations that exist in person and on
the Web in chat rooms, bulletin boards, and forwarded e-mails. Buzz is “the aggregate of all
person-to-person communication about a particular product, service, or company
at any point in time.”
Page
131 – When customers complain that something is broken, fix it!
Page
133 – Create reward-based incentives for your team, not fear-based punishment.
Recommended by: Morley Robbins, mmrobbins@claritygrp.com. If you enjoy the book or even just this book
report, send Morley a note thanking him for being an evangelist for great
customer service.
Overall rating of book: A good read but not a must read. I think you’ll get the most out of this book
if you read it while on vacation – with time to absorb and think about the
ideas from other industries and how you can apply them to your own company or
organization.
Order from: www.creatingcustomer
evangelists.com or from Amazon