The president of a marketing consulting and research firm warns marketers to shift their focus from customer conquest to customer retention. He shows how to track customers, serve them better, measure customer satisfaction, handle complaints, and convert short-term, repeat-purchasing into long-term cutomer loyalty.
"Don't start a loyalty program if you can't identify your most important customers -- why mistakenly retain costly customers who will put you out of business?"
"Far too many customer satisfaction programs are poorly conducted and are not integrated with an improvement process; as such they're an exercise in measurement futility!"
Terry Vavra is a world-acknowledged expert in customer retention strategies, having authored (or co-authored) three groundbreaking books: Loyalty Myths (Wiley 2005); The Customer Delight Principle (American Marketing Association 2001) and Aftermarketing: How to Keep Customers for Life Through Relationship Marketing (McGraw-Hill (1995). In Aftermarketing Terry was one of the first consultants to urge the business community to pay more attention to current customers. The book achieved international recognition through six non-English editions and sold over 50,000 copies. Terry has also authored two books on customer satisfaction methodology for the American Society for Quality (Improving Your Measurement of Customer Satisfaction, 1991 and Customer Satisfaction Measurement Simplified, 2002). His publishing accomplishments demonstrate Terry's commitment to helping organizations evolve their practice of satisfaction and loyalty tactics to make them maximally productive of increased revenue.
Terry's five books evidence his passion to evolve the tools of satisfaction and loyalty into true contributors to the bottom-line, not just 'nice to haves'. He is committed to helping organizations properly harness the information and power of satisfaction and loyalty. He is internationally sought for his advice and guidance, having met with management teams, addressed professional audiences, and conducted marketing seminars around the world from Brazil to Iceland, Japan to the United Kingdom, Singapore to Sweden.
Terry was President and co-founder (with his wife, Linda) of Marketing Metrics, Inc. a firm acquired by Ipsos, S.A. (of Paris, France) in 2003 and currently doing business as Ipsos Loyalty. Marketing Metrics was a marketing consulting company focusing on customer loyalty, stakeholder retention and satisfaction, and customer and brand equity. The firm counted among its cherished clients internationally respected organizations including:
Allstate
AT&T Wireless
Avaya
Bentley Motor Cars
CNA
Covance
Digital Equipment Corp
Ferrari North America
IBM PC and Consulting
Jaguar North America
Kinkos
KLA Tencor
March of Dimes
Mercedes-Benz USA
Merrill Lynch
Motorola
Morgan Stanley
The Port Authority of NY & NJ
Quest Diagnostics
Roche Diagnostics
Rolls-Royce Motor Cars
Sharp
Shiseido
Toys 'R' Us
United States Golf Assoc
United States Tennis Assoc
World Wildlife Federation
In addition to his entrepreneurial success, Terry has worked in the corporate and academic worlds. Prior to founding Marketing Metrics in 1983, Terry worked for The National Broadcasting Company and in the advertising field for Kenyon & Eckhardt as well as BBD&O and Levine, Huntley, Schmidt & Beaver. He served as Associate Professor of Marketing at the Lubin School of Business, Pace University for 15 years. He is an active member of the American Marketing Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Association of Public Opinion Research, The Association for Consumer Research and the Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals in Business.
Terry pioneered self-administered electronic interviewing first using pre-programmed computer diskettes and later Internet surveys. His methods have been employed in the mail, on the Internet and through kiosks. He has also published several computer software programs for marketing research including Verbatim AnalyzerTM for analyzing open-end survey responses.
Terry's academic degrees are: a bachelor of science in business administration from UCLA; a master of science in marketing also from UCLA and a Ph.D. in marketing from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.
