Customer Reviews

Secrets of Customer Relationship Management: It's All About How You Make Them Feel

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Barnes argues that "genuine" customer relationships are built by understanding and attending to the emotional experience generated by customer interactions. Accordingly, retention tactics that merely increase switching costs or reward customers for loyal behaviour are not sufficient in creating true long-term customer value.

Barnes' work accepts and compliments the work of other authors who present a more mechanical, economic view of the customer relationship. He reminds those with technology-driven customer strategies that CRM is fundamentally about people. Readers using this book in addition to Rust, Zeithaml and Lemon's "Driving Customer Equity" will gain a very balanced appreciation of customer-focused marketing today.

Long on text and short on graphics and case examples, this book is not a quick read. However, for those compelled to invest some time in this subject, the content is well written and useful.

Chapter 4 contains a particularly useful discussion on drivers of customer value.

In Chapter 10, Barnes presents a relatively pessimistic view on possibilities of developing genuine customer relationships through the Internet. Accordingly, those looking to improve their e-channel knowledge should probably look elsewhere.

Dan Michaluk is a simulation designer for ExperiencePoint, creators of award-winning business simulations.

Barnes's discussion on CRM is unique: instead of looking at managing systems and processes--what I called the operation issues of CRM--Barnes discussed and illustrated how personal CRM should be. This is not a manual for CRM implementation; if you do happen to work on CRM related matters, this is a must as you will gain an insight of what CRM is about--making your customer feel good. It's that un-complicated!

One chapter I found irresistable is the chapter on Internet and CRM. I believe the author had summarized and highlighted the essence of implementing CRM through Internet, and what considerations to give etc.. It is not tactical, but you will find his inputs valuable.

Happy reading.

It IS all about how you make them feel

To the company or individual who believes that price and product features are dominant drivers of customer behavior, Barnes doesn't so much reveal secrets, as issue a direct challenge arguing that the health of the customer relationship determines the long term outlook of the business.

Barnes' view, based on a considerable amount of research with companies in North America and Europe, is that even customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are not sufficient concepts for understanding why customers chose to do business with a particular firm. In his view, it's emotional. Customers have so many choices today, and there are so many good suppliers, that they can, (in fact need to), base their purchase decisions on how they feel about doing business with a given supplier.

Just because it's about emotions, however, doesn't mean it's unmanageable or even unmeasurable. For his clients, Barnes assesses the value that can be created for the customer in the relationship. He tests the company's actual performance in delivering it. He assesses, as well, the long term economic value of the relationship to the company and the cost of maintaining it. With this information strategic decisions can be made about where and how much to invest in developing relationships.

Like many business books today, this book could stand a resolute editor. Barnes is clearly pitching a point of view, so perhaps it's understandable that he covers the same ground from several different directions, but it does get repetitive. The repetition, however, doesn't diminish the message, and the reader looking for justification for developing about the emotional connection to the customer will find a great deal of support, insight, and methodology here.

Throughout the book, Barnes does a great job of revealing in depth detail on the objectives that he is trying to portray. He starts by trying to describe the term "relationship," saying that one of the main reasons that people struggle with forming relationships with their customers is because it is such a complex term that does not have a simple definition. Barnes uses different metaphors and examples to show how valuable relationships are to a company, how to build relationships with one's customers, and how to retain them in order to maintain a long-term customer base.

One of the reasons that I did enjoy the book is because of his detailed writings. For example, he breaks the characteristics of a strong relationship down to eight, and he devotes nearly half of a page to describing each characteristic. This way, if I wanted to look deeper into a term, I had the option to. However, his detailed writings act somewhat like a "two-edged sword" throughout the book. On one hand, I could examine a term very precisely, but on the other hand, this led to a very wordy, sometimes hard to read, book. I did enjoy the details, but sometimes I found it to be almost too much. I felt that sometimes a few sentences could have described what Barnes took two pages to say.

Chapter two was a really good read. In this chapter, Barnes stated that not all customers are valuable. At first I thought that this was somewhat of a contradiction to some of his earlier statements about relationships, but Barnes explained that too many companies focus too much on their customers that don't bring in as much revenue as some of their others. This is much like the 80-20 rule taught in nearly every marketing class--80% of a company's business comes from 20% of their customers. Barnes says it is important to understand your customers and their value to your company.

Barnes also does a good job of describing how important loyalty is in a relationship. He says that if a customer is loyal, and they truly trust you and your company, you will have a better chance of keeping them as a customer for a longer period of time. He also describes how retaining customers is more cost-efficient than going out and getting new ones. A customer who has done business with you in the past may not be doing business with you now for many reasons, not just because they feel as if they were treated badly. Sometimes all it takes is a simple "touch" for these customers to do business again--a phone call, email, flyer, etc. This "touch" is more cost-efficient than doing the work necessary to obtain new customers.

Overall, Barnes reveals many characteristics on customer relationships. He breaks down the phrase and explores it from many different angles. This book helped me to get a better understand on what a relationship is, how to form one, and how to maintain the relationship. I will continue to use the information that I gained in this book in both my job and everyday life, and this book would be beneficial for anyone working in an industry where communication with others is necessary. However, the book is wordy and somewhat of a slow read, but it is truly insightful and contains great knowledge on the subject of customer relationships.

At last, someone who understands that "loyalty" is an emotional bond, human feeling, not simply bribery or monopolization under a sweeter-sounding name. Barnes' background in psychology allows him to take this view, and as a result he can write more usefully about what loyalty really is and really isn't than most anyone else out there.

When executives hear the term "customer relationship management" (CRM), they often break out in a cold sweat amid visions of six- or seven-figure implementations of staggeringly complex systems. But have no fear, you won't stumble over such looming obstacles in James G. Barnes's book. Rather he chooses an old-fashioned approach to CRM: actually building relationships with your customers. Barnes provides a variety of techniques to accomplish this basic task. Some of his suggestions are fresh and inspired, while others will sound pretty familiar to anyone in business. Either way, he documents them with his own thorough research and insightful accounts from other writers. Some readers will miss the nuts-and-bolts technical analysis that has come to define the modern concept of CRM, but getAbstract recommends this book to executives, marketing professionals and customer service managers who want to get back to traditional business values.

No serious manager in the new e-nvironment can talk about web based commerce ignoring the basic principles of Customer Relationship Management. This book gives the reader an insider's view of the general idea, basic guidelines and - most important - the philosophy of CRM. Well structured, well written...a must read.