The Customer Delight Principle : Exceeding Customers' Expectations for Bottom-Line Success [Hardcover]

Timothy L. Keiningham (Author), Terry Vavra (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 24, 2001

Here's how your company can take customer satisfaction to a new level and reap the profits!

. .

The Customer Delight Principle shows how customer delight -- not mere satisfaction -- drives repeat purchasing and customer loyalty. The book details how your company can build a customer delight-oriented organization and reveals many of the roadblocks that you are likely to encounter. How to monitor customer delight results, including measurement and validation against revenue, is covered, as is formulating payback curves for a customer delight investment, allocating resources for continued customer delight improvements, and the continued benchmarking of results.

.

.

.
• Statistics show that customer satisfaction alone is not enough. Over 60% of customers lost by companies have reported that they were at least "satisfied," in their experience with the company .
• Striving for more than customer satisfaction is a key strategy in Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM), the predominant marketing approach of today's most successful traditional and dot-com companies..

.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Techniques to Move Your Customers Beyond Mere Satisfaction--at Every Point of Contact

Global competition today is fierce, and customers who are merely satisfied with your company's products or services will soon be lured away by your competition. The Customer Delight Principle reveals how today's leading marketers consistently retain and grow their customer bases ��by moving beyond satisfaction to discover and fill each customer's unseen yet essential needs. Comprehensive in scope yet focused in treatment, this book reveals how to dramatically increase your organization's positive customer experiences, virtually eliminate the negative, ��and drive your customers to new levels of repeat purchasing, loyalty, and sheer delight.

Praise for The Customer Delight Principle

"Customer satisfaction should no longer be the goal of a service organization. In the new economy, what matters is customer retention and the bottom line. The Customer Delight Principle shows us how."
--Patrick Zacchea, Vice President, Van Kampen Funds

"Keiningham and Vavra raise the aspirations for customer satisfaction for all with the perspective of achieving customer delight. The concept is explained clearly using brand experiences almost all of us have surely had."
--George Stalk, Senior Vice President, The Boston Consulting Group, Editor, Breaking Compromises

"The Customer Delight Principle is a provocative and compelling read."
--Ross Goodwin, Corporate Customer Loyalty Manager, Hewlett-Packard Company

"Numerous studies have shown that anywhere from 60 percent to 85 percent of customers who switch firms would have been classified as satisfied according to conventional analytic procedures. With The Customer Delight Principle we hope to alert the business community to the pitfalls of managing for improved satisfaction. Organizations that understand our principles and manage accordingly will succeed."
--From the Preface

In today's Web-shopping, brand-hopping, global competitive environment, customers expect satisfaction. But too often, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in customer satisfaction measurement programs lead managers to blame themselves��--as opposed to poor underlying models--��for failure to promote positive changes and improved results.

The Customer Delight Principle presents a step-by-step program for taking your company further up the customer satisfaction continuum, from a reliance on the satisfaction-maintaining characteristics that customers increasingly take for granted to a focus on unexpected, customer delight-creating attributes. Renowned customer retention consultants and thought leaders Timothy Keiningham and Terry Vavra unveil a customer delight principle based not on wishful thinking and outdated research but instead on current real-world findings that include:

• Perceived costs of negative outcomes to a customer, and how they far outweigh the perceived benefit from expected outcomes
• The nonlinear relationship between perceived performance and customer satisfaction, in which customer attitude changes follow a classic diminishing-returns model
• Case studies of FedEx Customer Critical, Toys "R" Us, Mercedes-Benz USA, and others on determining the "delight-creating" attributes of a product or service, ��then concentrating performance-improvement efforts in those areas

Satisfied customers are good for business success--��just not good enough. Follow the steps outlined in The Customer Delight Principle to construct an innovative customer delight program for your own company, one designed to drive repeat purchasing and customer loyalty, ��along with bottom-line profit and value growth.

About the Author

Timothy Keiningham is senior vice president at Marketing Metrics, Inc., a global research and consulting firm that specializes in customer satisfaction measurement, customer retention program design and execution, marketing research services, and training seminars. He is the author of Return On Quality and Service Marketing.

.

Terry Vavra, Ph.D., is the cofounder and president of Marketing Metrics, Inc. A world-renowned authority in customer retention strategies, Dr. Vavra has designed retention programs for leading international companies including Digital Equipment, GTE, and IBM Consulting Companies. He is the author of Aftermarketing and Improving Your Measurement of Customer Satisfaction, and has written numerous articles for Journal of Marketing Research, Journaling of Marketing, Marketing News, and other professional publications.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill; 1 edition (July 24, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0658010042
• ISBN-13: 978-0658010040
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,084,966 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Customer Delight Principle, December 6, 2001

By 

Cornelius P Guth (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Customer Delight Principle : Exceeding Customers' Expectations for Bottom-Line Success (Hardcover)

I work in the sanitation industry and boy could the owner of my company as well as all his drivers and helpers could use a good dose of this book. On my companies behalf, I firmly believe and will try to enact some of the basic principles that are discussed in this book. Personally, I have gained a lot of knowledge and when I interact with customers, ( usually to put out fires ), I will benefit by implementing the strategies set forth in this book. Thumbs up!

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Right on the mark! Where have you guys been?, January 18, 2002

By 

Thomas C Bell Jr (Owensboro, KY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Customer Delight Principle : Exceeding Customers' Expectations for Bottom-Line Success (Hardcover)

"The Customer Delight Principle" by Keiningham and Vavra is the missing link to the mystery of why customer satisfaction, which seems like a sound principle, has failed with so many companies. Customer satisfaction has been perceived as a sound principle (and quite frankly - a way of life) for many corporate research and marketing departments for many years. Anyone in the field would have to admit that, while the principle sounds solid, the end results have almost always been less than satisfactory. Perhaps down right poor.

The "Customer Delight Principle" is the first publication that has been bold enough to shoot a hole in past theory and validate true bottom-line, measurable, results. Completing the final lesson in the ultimate goal for a customer oriented operation.

Practicing customer satisfaction techniques in the past can be compared with buying into the Lexus marketing and going out and buying a vehicle without a test drive. Until you know the feel, smell, taste, touch of a principle, and then truly have tested the outcomes, you never know what you are getting into. This book takes you through the test drive, and truly delivers the missing link!

Buy it, read it, create an internal educational project to incorporate this theory into your practices with management. If you do, you'll get a leap on the competition (before they read it).

Sincerely,

Thomas Bell

Note: Thomas Bell is a respected educator having dedicated much of his career advising corporate marketing departments with companies such as Gannett, CitiGroup, RDI Marketing & Research, and BMI.

5.0 out of 5 stars Satisfaction is NOT Enough, December 7, 2008

By 

Shel Horowitz "Shel Horowitz, author, Guerril... (Hadley, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Customer Delight Principle : Exceeding Customers' Expectations for Bottom-Line Success (Hardcover)

This rather academically-written, MBA-oriented book emphasizes that merely satisfying your customers isn't enough to build even loyalty, let alone the fervent ardor necessary for customers to recruit more customers on your behalf; you have to delight them. And the bar on delight keeps getting higher, because one of the factors leading to delight is that it's unexpected.

In other words...when a new, delightful practice is successful, it is adopted by the organization, and then becomes an industry best practice-and then it stops being delightful, because the customer begins to expect it as part of a minimum service standard. So innovation plays a key role.

This I think is a crucial insight, and one that makes perfect sense.

Keiningham and Varva also point out a number of other interesting observations, all based in research (and many accompanied by various charts and graphs):

* The ROI on improving delight is non-linear; certain little improvements may make a huge improvement in profitability, while others that cost more may have little effect, and the returns may shrink over time

* It's relatively easy to figure out which initiatives will offer the greatest return; just identify factors in the customer's experience that the customer sees as of critical importance, but where the current satisfaction rating is low

* Profitable delight initiatives often target high-dollar-value, low-cost clients

* If your customer survey is self-serving and focuses on your wants rather than the customer's, you won't get the data you need to improve

* Not everyone is delighted in the same ways, so segment your markets accordingly

* Multiple touches, when handled correctly, can make a customer feel appreciated and welcomed and special (the importance of which I discuss in my own book, Principled Profit)

* To delight customers, you need employees who are at least satisfied

* Marketing's primary role is not to shove products down people's throats, but "to understand the wants, needs, and expectations of current and potential customers, feeding this information into the business organization to help it create and distribute products or services that more closely address and answer these inherent needs," and its secondary role is to form and nurture connections with customers

* Customer delight strategies look at a customer's lifetime value and not so much at the current transaction

* Delighted customers not only proselytize to friends and colleagues on your behalf, they also spend substantially more

The book ends with three extended case studies of companies that benefited by long-term thinking and a delight-based retention strategy: Roche Diagnostic Systems, Toys "R" Us, and Mercedes-Benz USA. Roche and Toys "R" Us both needed turnaround strategies, but the case of Mercedes is especially interesting to me, because that wasn't about fixing a broken system so much as incorporating delight into the corporate culture with a true focus on serving the customer-and creating an entire business unit, in its own building, to do so. This wasn't cheap, in other words.

Among other things, Mercedes integrated eleven different databases, collecting different types of customer data, into a single system that anyone could access before interacting with a client (the company stopped using the word "customer" and stopped referring to its franchises as "dealers"). It also developed a strategic separation between client acquisition and retention functions (something Keiningham and Varva strongly advocate). Delight factors entered in not just providing emergency road service but also pre-trip routing services similar to AAA...a line of branded merchandise for sale...multiple touchpoints including anniversary of vehicle purchase and mileage awards at 100,000, 200,000, and 500,000 miles.

Does it work? After initiating the program, Mercedes was projecting an astonishing 86 percent repurchase rate! Even if their projections turn out to be inflated by 100%, a 43 percent repurchase rate is going to look mighty good for the bottom line.