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Customer Once, Client Forever: 12 Tools for Building Lifetime Business Relationships

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This book shows how to win Lifetime Clients in an easy to read and digest format. I have bought and read many business books but this is one of the top ones of all time. People who don't read this book and practice its principles will surely lose business to anyone who has! I run a small computer company and purchased a copy for each of my 40 employees and some copies for my best clients.

Customer Once, Client Forever: 12 Tools For Building Lifetime Business Relationships by Richard Buckingham (president of GoalStar Business Strategies working with Fortune 100 companies) is an upbeat business self-help book about how to turn one's customers into clients for life. Filled with concise, economically worded lessons and questions to ponder, each chapter offers a wealth of sound advice on such topics as continually improving oneself, gaining client feedback, and converting good clients into lifetime clients. Customer Once, Client Forever is an absolute "must" for any businessperson from cafe owners to marketing corporations who solicits and depends upon repeat customers!

This book presenting the ideas of how to become a successful sales or customer service. Those ideas are very practicable and useful. From preparation to follow-up, that book providing lots of ideas to let you turn your customer to lifetime client. There are lots of personal and real life examples to elaborate the ideas. How to superserve your customer? How to build lifetime rapport? All these questions can be answered after reading that book.

I can sure everyone can become a successful sales or customer services after reading that book. And author always remind us - TAKE ACTION!!!

So, take action now. Buy and keep one!

This book really brought out the elements of making a customer a lifetime business partner. Richard Buckingham did a great job on breaking down the steps you need to follow when building a lifetime client. The steps are every easy to follow and with every step he has a true story to share with his readers on how each step works. He also has great tools for salespeople to stay on top of their customer list and become the trusted advisors to the customer. I really enjoyed this book and I think anyone in sales or customer service should read this book.

This is a useful resource. It gives you a good list of items to improve customer satisfaction and perception. That said, it tends to oversimplify things and fails to address the tough items.

The author suggests good customer relations will lead to lifelong customers. But look at reality. Throughout this country, small businesses have been going under as large entities like Wallmart and Lowes offer better pricing. In Buckingham's view, Bob Johnson the local hardware guy secures lifetime customers with his caring nature, willingness to go the extra mile, and above-average service. Bob does this; he is the one to buy tickets to your kid's fundraiser, and spends 15 minutes telling you how to install a storm drain.

Unfortunately, once Walmart comes to town, Bob's former customers tend to shop there and come to him only for the tough jobs. In Buckingham's world, Walmarts achieve only marginal success as loyal customers reject their impersonal mass market approach; the monumental growth of these megastores which offer limited service but real bargains tells us differently.

The book would have been better had it dealt with the conflict between good pricing and good service, and when and how customers continue (how about a model of the unsentimental customer who continually assesses value, and returns only when that is provided).

So read the book and incorporate this as one perspective, but don't bet the house on it. You might find that competing on price and limiting unprofitable service can be a model that you will sometimes need to use.

Many common sense pieces of advice, nicely organized and clearly spelled out. A great refresher for anyone with experience and excellent primer for those entering any service industry. He reminds us all that its easier, smarter, and more rewarding to keep a client happy than it is to pound the pavement to find a new one. I was suprised and chagrined to realize that some of tips were techniques I knew but had over time forgotten to practice. Highly recommend this book.

This book is easy to understand with its clear structure, writer uses simple English to make sure all the readers can get what he is trying to say (and that is one of the tools he suggested, say your clients' language without jargon).
The 12 tools are organised in sequence, from managing internal business standard to performing excellent services to external clients, it provides lots of practical sugesstions in different aspects to build lifetime relationships with clients. Also, it's creative and useful to summarize the most urgent things that you need to do and put it in a box called 'Monday Morning', it's telling you what you can do to achieve those objectives he had mentioned, not just the theories.
In conclusion, it's worthwhile to read this book as it's very useful for your present or future business and interpersonal skills.