Beyond Customer Satisfaction to Customer Loyalty: The Key to Greater Profitability [Paperback]

Overall, this book represents a sophomoric effort to discuss the important issue of customer satisfaction and loyalty as it affects profitability. The strongest contribution this book offers appears in the first three chapters, where author Bhote presents the dogmatic reason for being of the satisfaction and loyalty measurement movement.

Where this book falls down horribly is in its "guidance". A few examples:

1. The author fails to demonstrate any real sense of scholarship, frequently offering opinions as "facts" or "expert proclamations" without any strong argument or empirical evidence to support these opinions. This is most evident when the author presents the "best" data collection approaches for measuring satisfaction and loyalty; though he even notes his ratings of value are purely subjective opinion, there is little discussion to support his relative value assessments. Also, Bhote fails to provide any kind of effort to present a convincing explanation of why customer satisfaction or loyalty does or should represent a primary causal agent of profitability. Theoretically, too, definitions and conceptualizations are weak. For example, loyalty is viewed as repeat purchase behavior within a given period, a view that is very much at odds with current mainstream theory in the extant scientific literature which views loyalty as multi-dimensional with both attitudinal and behavior aspects and sees customer retention as the consequence of many variables beyond satisfaction including (to name but a few) the existence of switching cost barriers, availability, price, and distribution channel convenience. A book showing good scholarship would be more diligent in covering the field and providing support for the minority view advocated.

2. Bhote often makes assertions of fact which are just not true or represent self-serving exaggerations. For example, he suggests that a weakness of mail surveys are their relatively poor response rates. While this might be true (though in my experience as a professional marketing research practitioner, I have found that mail surveys deliver response rates as high or higher than all other data collection modes other than, possibly, face to face interviewing), but the author states that mail surveys achieve response rates of 5 to at best 10 percent. Ridiculous. No competently conducted professional mail survey achieves a response rate less than 30% and thse achieved are typically substantially higher.

3. On page 104, Bhote claims that in their customer satisfaction measurement programs, "... companies like Caterpillar, Autospark, and Kroger ... concentrate on [measuring] just one parameter - speed of delivery." This statement is just plain wrong and undermines the entire book's credibility. I know this statement is inaccurate because I was the worldwide manager of marketing research at Caterpillar both before and after this book was published and I am well aware that speed of delivery was not and never has been a solitary focus of the company's customer satisfaction research program. Caterpillar's customer satisfaction measurement program measured (and continues to measure) customer feedback on a wide variety of aspects of the customer experience.

Buy another book on the subject. It is a sin that trees died to publish this rubbish.

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