Customer Reviews

Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force

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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 ½ 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!

Is this a book about marketing? Or about customer relations? Or about sales? Or about organizational growth? And now the correct answer: all of the above. What McConnell and Huba have accomplished in this single volume is truly impressive, at times stunning. They have consulted a variety of sources whom they gratefully acknowledge, such as Guy Kawasaki (who wrote the Foreword) as well as Emanuel Rosen, Richard Dawkins, Seth Godin, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, Richard Cross and Janet Smith, and Philip Kotler. However, McConnell and Huba are to be commended for formulating and then presenting their own cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective strategies by which to create "customer evangelists" who (in effect) become "a volunteer sales force."

Just within the book's first five (of 16) chapters, McConnell and Huba answer questions such as these:

1. What are the attributes of customer evangelists?

2. What are the six tenets of customer evangelism?

3. Why are customer evangelists the ultimate salespeople"?

4. How to begin the process of creating customer evangelists?

5. What is "Customer Plus-Delta" and what are its "ten golden rules"?

6. What must any organization do to achieve its own Customer Plus-Delta?

7. What are the five key lessons to be learned from Napster?

8. What are the five myths and realities about buzz?

9. Why is a meme so important?

10. Which helpful hints will help any organization to create its own meme?

Chapters 9-15 focus on HOW seven companies create "customer evangelists" who (in effect) become "a volunteer sales force." McConnell and Huba devote a separate chapter to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, SolutionPeople, O'Reilly & Associates, the Dallas Mavericks, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Southwest Airlines, and IBM. The last chapter all by itself is well worth far more than the cost of this book. In it, "The Customer Evangelism Workshop," McConnell and Huba review all of their key points and then suggest HOW literally any organization can (after appropriate modification, of course) use the six tenets of customer evangelism as a framework for its own initiatives. The three appendices which follow are worthy of note: Appendix A examines uses and abuses of e-mail communications, Appendix B offers "8 Tips on Creating an Ideavirus for Your Business," and Appendix C suggests how to measure customer evangelism.

I think this book will be of substantial benefit to decision-makers in literally all organizations (especially those with limited resources) who agree with McConnell and Huba that anyone within or associated with a given organization can -- and should -- help to "translate [its] value proposition into words the prospects can understand" as volunteers in its sales force.

Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out the sources listed in a brief but adequate References section. To those excellent sources I now presume to add Theodore Levitt's The Marketing Imagination; Bernd Schmitt's Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands; Michael Wolf's The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives; Jeffrey Shuman and Janice Twombly's Everyone Is a Customer: A Proven Method for Measuring the Value of Every Relationship in the Era of Collaborative Business; Stephen Denning's The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations; and David Maister's Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High-Achievement Culture.

To decision-makers in larger organizations, I also highly recommend Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina's Follow This Path: How the World's Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential as well as Carla O'Dell's If Only We Knew What We know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice.

What an incredible book. After reading this book, you realize the impact you have on your friends and family and you will want to be an evangelist for more products and services. The case studies in this book also show that it's not about investing millions of dollars in a marketing campaign - but about using a little creativity and personality to give your customers a feeling of excitement in buying your product or service so they will WANT to spread the word about your offering.

This book is excellent - not only as a must read for businesses but for anyone who buys anything. Everyone is an evangelist for something, but this book really makes you realize the benefits of your evangelism - and it makes you want to be an evangelist for more products, services and people. From a business perspective, it shows you how other companies have provided an atmosphere for growing evangelists - do you know how you are growing customer evangelists in your organization? Read the book - and I guarantee you will get ideas on how to create these relationships with your customers.

If only every business I did business with had the inclination to read and follow the advice in this book. No more shopping headaches! No more frustrating conversations with (and I use the term lightly) customer service representatives who really don't care about their customers!

Not only was this book easy, quick and enjoyable to read, it gave sound, practical, applicable advice. The author uses excellent, real-life examples of companies who have implemented (or not) the concepts he espouses. They're such simple concepts, really, yet so often dismissed in the name of (ironically) PROFIT, while being the most productive, cost-efficient means to that end. They're not novel ideas either, but ideas that definitely need to be reintroduced, and for those of us who actually want to be successful, implemented immediately.

This is not rocket science. For instance, the pitch that most businesses preach but don't practice - "the customer is number one" (bet you never heard that one before). Yet it would seem to me, as a loyal consumer of both goods and services, (and I know you know what I'm talking about here) that really excellent customer service is the exception to the rule. And what about "word-of-mouth advertising" - the (get this) least expensive, least taken advantage of, yet most successful, cost-effective form of advertising there is. When's the last time you figured word-of-mouth into your advertising budget?

Don't let these simple, common concepts fool you into thinking you don't need to read the book. I've been in customer service and/or sales all of my working life (which has been sufficient, thank you very much), and have always prided myself on providing just the type of excellent service the author talks about. For me, it was more than just a validation though; it provided me with the means, methods and incentive to implement these long-held beliefs in ways that will make my future company that much more successful.

This book's impact in my life, beyond the future benefit to my own start-up company (I'm really looking forward to increasing market share and taking business away from my competitors just by being myself and being friendly!), was to make an evangelist out of me: I immediately bought three more books to send to friends and family, told a number of other people about it, and wrote this review. That should tell you that this guy knows of what he speaks. Buy it. Read it. Pass it on. What a wonderful world this would be if everyone did.

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

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.

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.

CREATING CUSTOMERS EVANGELISTS is a book with back to basic values ideas - very refreshing! If what you do is good people will share that with others and create more business. Sounds so simple you may say but how do I help that along. That's what this informative book is about. There are so many flashy things out there in the world of marketing - why not just do what you do well and "get the word out" from the new relationships you've created with your quality product. Jackie and Ben have presented their ideas in an easy to read format - through stories of people who already have succeeded in this process. This book will give you new ideas to think about and great suggestions on how to implement them. I've also heard them speak and teach - very down-to-earth real people!

This book was not very useful if you want to create customers who recommend your business. There is a fair amount of soft proof that "evangelists" are valuable, a lot of vague examples cited, but almost no actionable ideas. Overall, I was pretty annoyed with this book, and off the top of my head, here is a list of the the things that annoyed me the most:

1. Not relevant to small companies. I am not sure how much can be learned from Southwest Airlines, Apple Computers, Harley Davidson. Some small companies were included, but the examples cited were mainly from major corporations.

2. Poorly organized. The chapter titles are not descriptive. The chapters themselves tend to ramble, and there are no sub-chapters. I ended up rewriting the table of contents myself, so I would better understand what I am reading. Here is what the TOC should have been:
PART I: INTRODUCTION
Ch. 1 - Introduction, Overview of the book
Ch. 2 - Value of Customer Evangelists
PART II: 6 STEPS TO CREATING C.E.
Ch. 3 - Customer Feedback
Ch. 4 - Provide Value Added Information
Ch. 5 - Promote Word of Mouth
Ch. 6 - Create Community (this is actually the title of this chapter)
Ch. 7 - Provide Low Risk Entry
Ch. 8 - Create a Cause (this is actually the title of this chapter)
PART III: CASE STUDIES
Ch. 9 - Creative Consultants
Ch. 10 - Book Publisher
etc. etc.

3. Almost no guidance on implementation. Like so many books written by consultants and marketers, this is a book of "big ideas", not about how to actually do anything. To give just one example, the chapter on customer feedback (title: "Customer Delta-Plus") goes on and on about the importance of getting feedback. Not one word on how to record this feedback in a database, how to analyze the data collected, or how to integrate this data into operations.

4. The case studies were worthless, and they are half the book. The writing is so convoluted, I could not figure out what they were trying to get at. In the first one ("Solution People"), I still don't even know what the business was (what the heck is "Creativity Consulting"?). These chapters would have received a failing grade in any decent high school composition class. The editors at Kaplan Publishers should be ashamed of themselves.

You get the idea. I did come away from this book with a few good ideas, but it was work to get through all the fluff.

A great book in line with Guy Kawasaki's Selling the Dream. It's not just a me-too book.
If you want your customer to become your best sales people, don't pass this book by. Invest in it and into Ben Mc Connell's Citizen Marketers: when the people are the message, as well as in Andy Sernovitz's Word of mouth marketing.
If you're making an e-commerce website, you would simply be a fool not to study the subjects covered by this book. It can also actually be applied to any modern form of communicaton including blogs. The only (small) critic which may be presented is that the author's approach is top-down when good word of mouth is, most of the times, user-generated (see MySpace and YouTube)
The author however did a really good job. Worth not only your money but devoting some of our precious life time to learn from it.