E-Service: 24 Ways to Keep Your Customers--When the Competition Is Just a Click Away

Also, the authors would often make sentances which made horrible use of words and phrases. At the top of page 42 you would read, "The importance of customer value is an especially critial one...". Importance is not a noun! It would make more sense to say, "The importance of customer value is especially critical..." The number of examples of bad grammer such as this was huge. I am a little impressed that it got passed editing.


Retain or Die   July 24, 2001
Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I have a bias which Zemke and Connellan apparently share: Literally anyone who has any contact with a customer (or client) is a "customer service representative." They include whoever answers the telephone; whoever greets visitors at the door or encounters them within the building; whoever delivers anything to a customer; whoever has direct contact with a customer's own customer, vendor, or service provider (e.g. banker, attorney, accountant, management consultant); and whoever in any other situation has an opportunity to add value to the customer relationship. You get my point. The authors of this book focus on a major challenge to all organizations: keeping customers, especially now when "the competition is just a click away." Customer retention is the name of this "game" and almost everyone within a given organization is a "player."

Zemke and Connellan organize their excellent material within fourteen chapters, presenting and then explaining 24 "key" strategies to maximize customer retention. These "keys" range from "Master the ETDBW [i.e. Easy to Do Business With] Design Basics" in Chapter 5 to "Use Incentives to Increase Spending" in Chapter 11. They then provide "A Seven-Lesson Crash Course in E-Service Improvement" in Chapter 12 followed by a thought-provoking chapter "The Future of the Net: Take These Predictions to the Bank" and, in the final chapter, a "Browser's Guide" which offers 80 "tips" such as "the long-term winners...will be those that have done the best job of supporting their customers and delivering that value in a way that seems effortless." I also appreciate the inclusion of "Notes" and "Additional Resources."

For small-to-midsize organizations especially, here in a single-volume are information and guidance sufficient to assist the design, launch, implementation, and refinement of an e-business customer service program. I think this book can also be of substantial value to much larger organizations which, I am convinced, should constantly re-evaluate such a program already in place. Recall the "bias" to which I referred earlier. Recent market research (generated by several million respondents) has revealed what is most important to customers: "feeling appreciated" and "ease of doing business" (or "convenience") were ranked either #1 or #2 among the attributes. Revealingly, "cost" is ranked anywhere between #9 and #14.

Do Zemke and Donnellan address all the "right" questions? No, but they don't miss many. Are all of their answers to various questions the "right" ones? Read the book and judge for yourself. In fact, I urge you to consult a number of other books which cover much of the same material. It would be imprudent (perhaps even stupid) to rely entirely on a single source. The authors identify several in the "Additional Resources" section to which I presume to add Treacy and Wiersema's The Discipline of Market Leaders (who have a great deal of value to say about "customer intimacy") as well as Customer Equity co-authored by Blattberg, Getz, and Thomas who provide a brilliant analysis of what could be called "the ROI of customer relationships."


Discusses all the elements which make a web site a success   February 13, 2001
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

How does an online business keep its customers when the competition's only a click away? From assuring customer satisfaction through personal emails to simplifying a Web interface for quick and easy navigation, this discusses all the elements which make a web site a success - or a failure. An essential guide to e-commerce businesses.