The Customer Marketing Method: How to Implement and Profit from Customer Relationship Management
By Jay Curry
The Free Press, 2000, $36.00
Jay Curry, chairman of the Customer Marketing Institute, cowrote this book with his son, Adam Curry, an Internet marketing consultant (and former MTV VJ). The book is divided into three sections: “How to Profit from CRM”, “How to Implement CRM” and “Customer Marketing and the Internet,” each of which is organized around a central image – the “customer pyramid”. The Currys outline a three-step marketing strategy of attracting customers, retaining them and moving them toward higher profitability, represented by the pyramid’s peak. – Karen Witham Lynch
Driving Customer Equity: How Customer Lifetime Value is Reshaping Corporate Strategy
By Roland T. Rust, Valarie A. Zeithaml and Katherine N. Lemon
The Free Press, 2000, $41.50
A company’s greatest assets? Forget about products, intellectual property or employees. According to the authors, customers are the newest yardsticks of value and worth. So how can companies successfully cultivate profitable customer relationships? The authors provide tools that will help companies gauge customer loyalty and retain the most valuable of those assets. – Megan Santosus
Emotional Value: Creating Strong Bonds with Your Customers
By Janelle Barlow and Dianna Maul
Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2000, $44.95
This book starts from the basic premise that people are driven by their emotions and then focuses on ways that companies can add emotional value to customer interactions to improve service and to increase customer loyalty. The book’s five sections focus on developing a service culture that is receptive to emotional involvement, that manages emotional competence and authenticity, that applies empathy to customer experiences, that uses customers’ complaints as opportunities to apply positive emotion and that increases customer loyalty through emotional bonds. – Lafe Low
Monitoring, Measuring and Managing Customer Service
By Gary S. Goodman
Jossey-Bass, 2000, $44.95
There’s no such thing as accidental customer service, according to Gary Goodman. Great customer service is a practice that can be learned, honed and repeated. This book aims to show managers how to train service reps and to help companies evaluate the effectiveness of their customer service departments. Throughout the book, Goodman uses real-life examples to illustrate the importance of polite and consistent customer service processes that are worth repeating. – Megan Santosus
Value Nets: Breaking the Supply Chain to Unlock Hidden Profits
By David Bovet and Joseph Martha
John Wiley & Sons, 2000, $44.50
Revamping a company’s supply chain goes beyond streamlining procurement and speeding up manufacturing. Customer satisfaction is at the heart of that process, according to authors Bovet and Martha. Using case studies from the likes of Ford, Nike and Weyerhaeuser, the authors – consultants with Mercer Management Consulting – outline a supply chain design that delivers services and products in ways that promote customer loyalty and satisfaction. – Megan Santosus
Peak Performance: Aligning the Hearts and Minds of Your Employees
By Jon R. Katzenbach
Harvard Business School Press, 2000, $47.95
We all know it’s cheaper to retain a good staff than to go out and recruit a new one. In Peak Performance, Jon Katzenbach discusses how successful companies maximize their personnel investment and achieve top results. By examining several high-profile organizations, including Home Depot, KFC and the U.S. Marine Corps, the author identifies five motivational techniques they have in common. He concludes with steps that readers can take to inspire their own employees. – Tom Field