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

The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use News Releases, Blogs, Podcasting, Viral Marketing and Online Media to Reach Buyers Directly by Meerman Scott, David
Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive by Goldstein, Noah J.
The Big Book of Customer Service Training Games by Carlaw, Peggy

Must have book for anyone with a website.
E-service is a great guide to a successful customer service oriented website. Which is how every website should be! Learn what you can do to stand out from the competition.

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.

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."