The Customer Delight Principle

This book presents techniques to move your customers beyond mere satisfaction. At every point of contact, global competition today is fierce, and customers who are merely satisfied with your company's products or services will soon be lured away by your competition. "The Customer Delight Principle" reveals how today's leading marketers consistently retain and grow their customer bases by moving beyond satisfaction to discover and fill each customer's unseen yet essential needs. Comprehensive in scope yet focused in treatment, this book reveals how to dramatically increase your organization's positive customer experiences, virtually eliminate the negative, and drive your customers to new levels of repeat purchasing, loyalty, and sheer delight.Praise for "The Customer Delight Principle": 'Customer satisfaction should no longer be the goal of a service organization. In the new economy, what matters is customer retention and the bottom line. "The Customer Delight Principle" shows us how' - Patrick Zacchea, Vice President, Van Kampen Funds. 'Keiningham and Vavra raise the aspirations for customer satisfaction for all with the perspective of achieving customer delight. The concept is explained clearly using brand experiences almost all of us have surely had' - George Stalk, Senior Vice President, The Boston Consulting Group, Editor, "Breaking Compromises". "'The Customer Delight Principle" is a provocative and compelling read' - Ross Goodwin, Corporate Customer Loyalty Manager, Hewlett-Packard Company.'Numerous studies have shown that anywhere from 60 per cent to 85 per cent of customers who switch firms would have been classified as satisfied according to conventional analytic procedures. With "The Customer Delight Principle" we hope to alert the business community to the pitfalls of managing for improved satisfaction. Organizations that understand our principles and manage accordingly will succeed' - From the Preface.In today's Web-shopping, brand-hopping, global competitive environment, customers expect satisfaction. But too often, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in customer satisfaction measurement programs lead managers to blame themselves - as opposed to poor underlying models - for failure to promote positive changes and improved results. "The Customer Delight Principle" presents a step-by-step program for taking your company further up the customer satisfaction continuum, from a reliance on the satisfaction -maintaining characteristics that customers increasingly take for granted to a focus on unexpected, customer delight-creating attributes.Renowned customer retention consultants and thought leaders Timothy Keiningham and Terry Vavra unveil a customer delight principle based not on wishful thinking and outdated research but instead on current real-world findings that include: Perceived costs of negative outcomes to a customer, and how they far outweigh the perceived benefit from expected outcomes; the nonlinear relationship between perceived performance and customer satisfaction, in which customer attitude changes follow a classic diminishing-returns model; and, case studies of FedEx Customer Critical, Toys 'R' Us, Mercedes-Benz USA, and others on determining the 'delight-creating' attributes of a product or service, then concentrating performance-improvement efforts in those areas. Satisfied customers are good for business success - just not good enough.Follow the steps outlined in "The Customer Delight Principle" to construct an innovative customer delight program for your own company, one designed to drive repeat purchasing and customer loyalty, along with bottom-line profit and value growth.

Timothy L. Keiningham is senior vice president, Marketing Metrics, Inc. and is a recognized authority in services marketing.

Terry G. Vavra, Ph.D., is president and co-founder of Marketing Metrics, Inc. and is a world-acknowledged expert in customer retention and satisfaction strategies. He is the author of the international bestseller, Aftermarketing: How to Keep Customers for Life Through Relationship Marketing (McGraw-Hill).