Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus (Paperback)

~ Professor Edward F. McQuarrie (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"We've asked hundreds of marketers and thought leaders for the most important thing a marketer can do for a firm. Answer: Bring new techniques for discerning real customer needs. That's where Customer Visits comes in. This jewel of a book shows you how to make customer visits powerful tools for customer insight. It's a great read and a powerful resource." -- Ralph A. Oliva, Executive Director, Institute for the Study of Business Markets Penn State University "This new edition of Customer Visits is a must-read book for anyone whose firm markets products to other businesses. This is a book I read every few years, just to remind myself what a good execution of a piece of marketing research requires. I always strongly recommend it as a professional purchase to my MBA Marketing Core students. Ed McQuarrie presents a great deal of practical content on how to prepare for, conduct and analyze customer visits - in an enjoyably readable and practical form." -- Abbie Griffin, Royal L. Garff Presidential Chair in Marketing University of Utah This book will interest company representatives and management involved in sales, customer relations, and marketing. It is clearly written and offers an interesting history of the development of the tradition the customer visit. Reference & Research Book News" --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Description

The Second Edition of Customer Visits offers a complete guide to all aspects of planning and executing a programme of visits to customers by individual managers and cross-functional teams.

Features new to this edition include: expanded coverage of ad hoc results; more examples of good and bad procedures; expanded section on how to analyze visit data; expanded coverage of kinds of questions to be asked of customers; and better integration with other market research tools. Customer Visits offers a wealth of specific advice, and shows how customer visits can assist new product development and the improvement of customer satisfaction.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Sage Publications, Inc; 2nd edition (April 2, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761908846
• ISBN-13: 978-0761908845
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.3 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #746,772 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical, August 22, 2000

By	Jose Campos (West Linn, Oregon USA) - See all my reviews

McQuarrie obviously speaks from experience. His book is very practical, easy to navigate. Though, the most important attribute is that it is realistic. The author realizes the realities of the corporate environment and allows the reader to progress towards perfection rather that achieve perfection first time out.

Ideal book for development teams. Many "how to" ideas and a logical progression.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Ideas for Beginners and Advanced Alike, February 15, 2000

By A Customer

I found this book to be quite easy to read and also make many useful, hands on types of suggestions of how to set up, conduct and debrief customer interviews. More than that, it also gives you a recipe for starting from scratch if you need it - that is, identifying what your purpose is, who you're going to interview, who should be doing the interviewing from your side (e.g. the Company's 'team'), how to conduct the interview and what to do once you've completed it. For those of you who are already familiar (or even comfortable) with Customer Visits, this book will still give you interesting and useful pointers - such as how to go about getting agreement from the customer to tape an interview and why this could prove invaluable to you in the future. In short, it's not a 'tour de force' for Customer Visit/Marketing junkies, but will surely give even those folks some good information that you can use. For the rest of us, it's quite a useful 'how to' book to start out with.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mandatory Reading for Product Development Professionals, March 13, 2002

By	Steven Linsk (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews

Edward McQuarrie is clearly skilled in the practical use of customer visits (on-site interviews) as a qualitative data collection tool, particularly for B2B products. His frequent citations of real-world studies that support investment in primary customer research are both useful and validating for industry practitioners engaged in new product definition. I gave this book 4 stars rather than 5 because it falls short in several areas that are important to prospective readers who may be working professionals looking for "a better way" to characterize customer needs.

Customer requirements are only one (although arguably the most important) data point that influences new product definition. McQuarrie doesn't really position the customer visit method very well in the context of the other variables that drive overall product definition. Secondly, while the book does an excellent job describing how to go about planning and conducting customer visits, it fails to provide more than a cursory treatment of how to use the information collected to develop appropriate, useful, prioritized new product requirements in a resource-constrained environment.

Other than these few items (which may be outside the focus of the text anyway), I would highly recommend this book. It provides valuable insight to understanding VOC (voice of the customer) and should be included in any serious product development professional's personal library.