Customer Winback has great information and wonderful examples (presented in depth) of what companies can do to address a much-neglected area of customer service--winning back lost customers. It shows how this concept is just as important as emphasizing customer loyalty and customer satisfaction in not only maintaining customers, but keeping them delighted and coming back to buy more.

It is very well organized, well-written and covers a wide range of material. It also gives you many ideas to implement at your own company. Just one chapter provides you with more substance than many entire books. This is an excellent customer service book and a must for customer service managers. I recommend it highly.

With annual churn rates for most companies in the range of 10% to 40%, and staff turnover an equal problem, customer loss has become a major priority and cause for concern. Yet, few companies have programs to save or recover at-risk and lost customers. Customer loss and win-back is not only a critical challenge, it is a significant revenue opportunity. My colleague, Jill Griffin, and I have explored the dynamics and treatment of customer loss, the sales and profit represented by winning back customers, how to regain attractive former customers, and how to make your company defection-proof in the first place. We've included the results of groundbreaking original research, for instance, which uncovered the relationship and value disconnect that often exists between suppliers and their customers. The book provides scores of powerful how-to's and examples of the ways successful companies have included win-back in their CRM programs. For every individual, manager, group, or company wanting to understand customer lifetime value, customer life cycles, and the full spectrum of customer loyalty, this is a must read!

Customer Winback, authored by loyalty experts Griffin and Lowenstein, is an important new book in the field of customer loyalty. Published in 2001, Customer Winback is packed with information, examples and practical advice about how to improve sales and profits by re-acquiring lost customers.

Customer re-acquisition is an area that has not been well explored before this book. Most companies don't even track lost customers, much less try to win them back. Yet, as the authors point out, your chances of converting a lost customer are usually much better than your chances of converting a new prospect. This simple fact is a good economic justification for developing a winback program.

How do you win them back? The authors don't offer a magic solution. Instead they provide a business process you can use long term, which is of course much better than a silver bullet. It starts with learning why you lost them in the first place, and then deciding who you want to win back. The authors provide some useful tools for approaching each winback situation. One I like is "Second Lifetime Value" which is sort of a reincarnation of the lifetime value concept.

In the USA, the timing of this book (Spring, 2001) couldn't be better. When the economy is shaky, companies want to do everything they can to keep their customers, or win them back.

Chapters:

1- Why Customer Win-Back is Critical to Your Success

2- Managing the Big Three: Acquisition, Retention and Win-Back

3- Winning back a Lost Customer

4- How to Save a Customer on the Brink of Defection

5- Mobilizing and Managing a Win-Back Team

6- When You Think Your Customer is Safe from Defection

7- Building a Customer Information System that Drives Loyalty

8- Targeting Prospects with Strong Loyalty Potential

9- Leveraging the Power of Customer-Focused Teams

10- How to Build a Fiercely Loyal Staff

Gary Kopacek, CEO, Mill City Marketing

As the author of CUSTOMER RETENTION, my purpose in writing the book was to present the mindset, plus measurement tools and metrics, needed to create customer loyalty. Customer loyalty is built on a solid foundation of perceived value, rather than satisfaction, or even delight. Satisfaction tends to represent a passive, reactive relationship with the customer, while retention and loyalty require more proaction, closer contact, and greater anticipation of customer needs. The book makes the case for this, and shows how to bring loyalty processes into any organization for greater sales and profit.

Customer Retention, or Loyalty, should be at the forefront of every employee's mind. This book really brings out the reality of not keeping the customer's loyalty vs. earning their loyalty and retaining their business. If you are in a position that needs to create an atmosphere of "How can we make this customer come back time and time again, without thinking of another company?" then this is the book for you.

Don't take another minute without purchasing the book. If you do, your customer base will suffer.

Chris

This book has been well written. It has a good flow of thought and the different chapters are well connected. It is excellent for motivational reading because for a person who is unaware of the concepts of Total Quality Management, this book adresses the heart of the topic. TQM is a way of improving one's business by doing various specific activities. All these activities have the end customer satisfaction in mind. Thus this book is not only good for understanding the concept of Customer Focus, it goes a long way inconvincing the reader with the validity of TQM. Some of the illustrations are excellent, for example the one which illustrates the relationship between the degree of company success and the degree of customer focus. It also gives many interesting real life examples on how customer focus has had an effect on the business of various organizations. All in all, this book makes for interesting reading and leaves an impression on the reader's mind about the validity of the point that it attempts to make.

As the author of THE CUSTOMER LOYALTY PYRAMID, my purpose in writing the book was not to provide a TQM template for customer loyalty. Instead, it was to offer a blueprint and methods for any individual, group, or company wanting to organize for greater commitment to customer loyalty. Creating optimal customer and staff loyalty is the logical goal of any organization. The reality is that few companies in any industry, perhaps less than 5%, have truly created a customer-focused culture, use customer information to best advantage, and apply the most effective actions to achieve customer loyalty. Offering user-friendly cases and examples, the book provides both the architecture and the materials to help make this happen!