Books About Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty

This page includes the following books:

• Loyalty Rules! by Reichheld
• Managing Customer Value by Gale
• Good to Great by Collins
• Built to Last by Collins and Porras
• Customer Satisfaction Measurement Simplified by Vavra
• Improving Your Measurement of Customer Satisfaction by Vavra
• Designing and Conducting Survey Research by Rea and Parker
• The Achievement Zone by Shane Murphy

Loyalty Rules! is an excellent introduction to loyalty from the leading loyalty expert, Fred Reichheld of Bain & Company. His key point is that loyalty comes from providing value to customers, so you need to make it central to your company mission. This book has great examples from leading customer driven companies. It includes checklists and even a questionnaire for a loyalty survey. We highly recommend this book.

This is the "foundation" text of customer value analysis. As such, it may be considered a forerunner to Reichheld's book above, and to much of the current direction in CRM. Read this book to understand why delivering customer value is crucial to business success. This book also is closely related to Baldrige National Quality Program criteria.

Good to Great is the result of Collins' research into companies that went from average to outstanding performance and kept on performing extremely well for many years. It provides insights into what produced these lasting turnarounds. Collins is true to his goal of basing the book on his research findings - it doesn't rely on related literature. For example the words "customer", "market", "value", "Reichheld", and "Gale" are not in the index of Good to Great.

This book is the precursor to Good to Great. In Built to Last, Collins analyzed the history of superior companies over many years. What makes his study unique is each superior company is contrasted with one of its competitors. He went back 30 years to when these companies were of similar strength, then examined what made one do better than the other. The takeaway is identification of characteristics of successful companies. He found that a strong corporate culture or vision was vital to success.

This is a very good introduction to customer satisfaction measurement. Don't be misled by the ISO flavor - it's also really useful for anyone who is setting up their first customer satisfaction program, or who wants to see how to get more out of their current program.

This customer satisfaction guide contains introductory and more advanced concepts and advice for improving satisfaction programs.

Clearly written, this introduction to survey research is a handy overview that covers the survey process including questionnaire design, sampling design, and presenting and analyzing results.

Murphy is a sports psychologist who works with top athletes. His advice applies to anyone who wants to accomplish things. This books is currently out of print, but you can get used copies at Amazon - click the image above.