Satisfaction: How Every Great Company Listens to the Voice of the Customer » (Reprint)

Chris Denove is a vice president of J. D. Power and Associates, where he specializes in helping businesses improve customer satisfaction and profits through listening to the voice of their customer.
James D. Power IV is an executive vice president and the oldest son of the company founder. He represents the company around the world as leader of its international operations.

The ultimate guide to customer satisfaction, from the people who understand it better than anyone

For nearly forty years, J. D. Power and Associates has been synonymous with measuring customer satisfaction and helping businesses understand what customers really want. Now two of the company's senior executives, Chris Denove and James D. Power IV, unlock the vault on decades of closely guarded research data—and insights previously available only to the firm's clients.

This is the first book that really explains how great companies like Lexus, UPS, JetBlue, and Enterprise Rent-A-Car get it right, delivering consistently high customer satisfaction and translating it into profitable growth. It will teach you, for instance, how to:
• Understand the financial link between satisfaction and profits
• Turn customers who are simply “satisfied” into vocal advocates
• Empower frontline employees to do the right thing
• Use problem resolution as an opportunity to make new fans

Satisfaction offers advice for companies large or small, for product manufacturers, service providers, and retailers alike. It delivers not just a stockpile of customer research, but a road map to developing specific policies and processes. It also tells fascinating stories of companies that don't just talk the talk, but walk the walk every day—and of other companies that ignored the voice of the customer, with dire consequences.

Library Journal

A customer's experience with a retailer, call center, or web site should be positive. At a minimum, any company's customer service department should acknowledge its customers, answer their calls, and be capable of processing their orders. Customer service is one of the hottest new topics in the world of marketing. Denove and Power, both affiliated with J.D. Power and Associates, get down to the basics of the subject in this book. Most executives seem to understand that if you give people a negative experience, they will tell their friends over and over again, but, as the authors state here, those same executives often fail to see that the company call center-full of tired and unmotivated customer service employees who make up a growing industry in itself-may not be the best way to give customers what they want in the first place. In contrast, JetBlue customer service representatives often get to work out of their homes. Denove and Power do a great job of arguing why customer satisfaction is important for any business and how to make it a part of an entire organization. Similar books include Janelle Barlow and Paul Stewart's Branded Customer Service, which speaks of the emotional level at which good or bad service affects customers, and Jeffrey F. Rayport and Bernard J. Jaworski's Best Face Forward, which argues for programmed customer service technologies, as a stable and predictable solution. Because Satisfaction is really intended for practicing professionals, it is an appropriate acquisition for corporate as well as business school libraries.-Stephen Turner, Turner & Assocs., San Francisco Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.