Customer Reviews

Creating Customer Evangelists

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What does it take to get your customers to see the light, to praise your product like evangelists selling their creeds? How do you create customer evangelists whose word of mouth will convert other acolytes to your product? Authors Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba offer chapter and verse. They tell you how to encourage customers to preach your message for you. However, before consumers will take to the pulpit, you must have an excellent product or service that converts their thinking. There's good information here, though not much new. The last chapter sums everything up as nicely as a homily, and the appendix provides additional tips on e-mail marketing and jump-starting the evangelical process. The authors' penchant for name-coining adds little; at best it's confusing and at worst downright annoying ("word of mouse" is cute, but "Napsterizing"? "Customer Plus-Delta"?). We are is glad to see someone preaching the cause of being customer-oriented - we're already pretty faithful about that.

I'm not sure how to put this... Ben and Jackie just "get it" when it comes to not only customer service, but business as a whole. I've never actually read a book before that made me speak to it out loud like it was a person. Every chapter I was saying things like "Brilliant!" and "Wow! Now that's what businesses should be doing". Smiling through the entire book, it not only talked about the concept of it, but gave great examples and THEN tells YOU how to do it in your business. Pure genius. Just buy it, period.

It seems fitting to be writing a review to evangelize a book written on the topic of making evangelists out of your customers. I can't help but think after reading Creating Customer Evangelists, "how can I let as many people as possible know how wonderful this book is!"

I'd venture a guess that many of you reading this review have delved into a lot of business books in your lifetime. I'm sure that the best of intentions were taken into each book, only to find out that  way through the majority of them, they had lost their relevance and hadn't delivered on their promise. I mean, really, how many books about marketing can possibly have any really interesting and immediately helpful ideas?

While CCE is not a fiction thriller, it will keep you as engaged as any good novel would, because at it's heart, it tells a lot of great short stories, and it tells them with insight and conviction. The book follows a "case study" approach and illustrates a world-class case example of a company doing CE right in each chapter. And, unlike those feel-good business books about how breakthrough something is that leave you hanging with no action items, CCE includes a full set of appendices on how you, yes you and your business, can get going on your CE efforts.

The book lays out the process of creating customer evangelists in the following order:
1. Customer Plus-Delta (you need to be continuously gathering customer feedback)
2. Napsterize Your Knowledge (share and share alike, and freely, and not cheap crap either - put some good material out there!)
3. Build the Buzz (find the WOM networks in your industry and tap into them, not blatantly, but intelligently. Oh, and give to get. See principle #2)
4. Create Community (encourage your customers to mingle, either physically or virtually - build a coalition of customers around your cause)
5. Make Bite-Size Chunks (devise specialized, smaller offerings to get your customers to bite) The software industry uses this tactic with abandon. When's the last time you bought software w/ out a trial download?
6. Create a Cause (focus on making your world, industry, community, and company a better place because you were involved)

These are easy enough principles to understand, but NOT_EASY_TO_EMBRACE. How many of you are prepared to "Napsterize" what you know to everyone in and around your industry? Really, how many? Do your marketing managers actually "participate" in the industry and community, or are you all a bunch of bystanders.

Creating customer evangelists is about more than "implementing a few best-practices", this is not six-sigma, but there are ways to measure, and Ben & Jackie have an entire appendix devoted to those to!

Are you ready to embrace your best customers as customer evangelists? Get the book - get the culture!

McConnell and Huba have compiled fascinating information, facts, stats and interviews with some the country's best customer service based businesses and compiled them all in one place for perusal. With ideas and motivation that can improve customer service for micro-business to mega-business, Creating Customer Evangelists shows how to bring back and implement the "corner store" feel in a global economy. From simply answering emails to purchasing millions of dollars worth of customer and employee incentives there is an idea that will work - or will spawn an idea that will work - for you.

Additionally, an interesting read for anyone interested in the development of the companies featured within the book (Krispy Kreme, Southwest Airlines, The Dallas Mavericks, Build-A-Bear Workshop, IBM, O'Reilly and Associates, and SolutionPeople).

Finally, the appendix with its condensed "how-to" questionnaire is a great resource for really examining a business's level of customer and employee service, satisfaction, and commitment.

Here is an easy-to-read marketing guide explaining how to create customer and employee satisfaction on a grand scale. That alone should justify the five stars.

I love this book! The information in this book is helping me more than getting my MBA. I have purchased nine copies to give to everyone I work with.
This book puts together pieces of information that we know as customers and individuals who network with many others. This book helped me realize how much I have turned to others for information for all the important decisions I have been making whether it is for a purchase, a job, a healthcare decision or a place to eat. This book is a serious compilation of research that deserves reading by everyone interested in how humans have reacted to the information age, not just marketers. Some of the book is overstated, but it is easier to digest than all the other dozen or so books in this field I have read.

Do you have a great product or service? Do your customers rave about you? Do you wish you could get more people to recommend you to their associates? Want your revenue to go through the roof without breaking the bank?

This is a great book on how to boost sales without making major investments in sales, advertising or marketing. Just develop passionate customers and make it easy for them to recommend your company to others.

The book is loaded with practical examples of companies who have built armies of fans who spread the word about their products. The strategy is unique and fresh, but not difficult. It's definitely worth a read, and should be in every marketer's personal library.

Of course, if you don't have a great product or service, you must address that issue, or you'll have a very difficult time generating customer evangelists.

Good luck.

Dan Limbach...

I love the practical ideas in this book on relating to your customers and creating customer evangelists. Here's a quote I like "Inside a business thriving with customer evangelists, evertyhing is designed to keep customers coming back." or how about "Customer evangelism is based on loyalty to people, not things."

This book is filled with great marketing principles, some will find the ideas radical or new, others will find it just a terrific summary and presentation. I am recommending this book to everyone I know!

Exceptional research and detailed case analyses make Creating Customer Evangelists a required read for any astute business manager. If traditional marketing channels fail to establish a clientele who believe in your product or service, let this book be your guide toward converting regular customers into delighted evangelists.

Geared toward both employees and managers, the text provides the psychological underpinnings of a "delightful" customer experience, the attributes necessary for such an experience to occur, and plenty examples of companies successfully deploying a customer-centric enterprise. Answering both the questions "what" (types of experiences nurture customer evangelism) and "how" (do I foster such a culture within my organization), McConnell and Huba have successfully developed a tool that is easily aligned to any business environment.

Beginning from their manifesto of customer evangelism, the text introduces novice readers to the fundamental changes transforming marketing theory, including the expansion of McCarthy's "4 P's" concept, the unhealthy notion of "marketing as advertising", and the failure of mass marketing. Citing multiple research studies, evidence is clearly presented linking sales dollars to word-of-mouth, or evangelistic, sources. Not a terribly surprising fact on its own, however, McConnell and Huba dig deeper to understand the particular nature of the evangelists' psyche.

Six tenets are presented in successive chapters, each representing one major theme common to those companies already enjoying successful customer evangelism. More than simple rules-of-thumb, each concept is more of a philosophy, coupled with brief anecdotes describing those practitioners who have blazed the trail proving its value. You must listen to your customers, determine what they need, and adjust marketing efforts accordingly. You must generate a buzz, not necessarily through guerrilla marketing efforts, but through high visibility in targeted markets conducive to spreading the word. You must build a community of customers and create a cause for which they will support.

More than half the text is dedicated to an in-depth examination of seven companies who have built success upon the foundation of customer evangelism. From the old (IBM) to the new (Southwest Airlines), both famous (Krispy Kreme Donuts) and quirky (SolutionPeople), compelling evidence is provided to both substantiate the customer evangelism framework and to demonstrate its applicability in practice. The final chapter provides a comprehensive scorecard for benchmarking your own efforts while promoting customer evangelism.

A refreshing combination of theory and practicality are offered throughout this book, making it an essential addition to the collection of any business manager.

Joshua A. Gerlick

For every marketer or business owner who wants to stretch their marketing budget, reinforce their sales efforts and promote their brand, Creating Customer Evangelists is a must-read. Huba and McConnell do a terrific job of using real-world examples to illustrate their points, which at first might seem intuitive, but taken as a whole really add up to some terrific insights into this emerging best practice. The best chapter is perhaps #16, Customer Evangelism Workshop, which rovides some practical ideas for building momentum for a similar program in your organization.

I manage a retail store for a growing chain, and bought this book looking for ways to create my own BUZZ in the outlet I manage. Well, I found this book to be full of great ideas and strategies for my own situation. The profiles of different companies all have something to offer no matter what industry you work in. There are some real lessons to be learned - and more importantly, some very real ways to take action by following the example set by the books case studies. Great.