My teacher in grad school used this book in our database marketing class and Mr. Vavra hits the nail on the head. If you own a business or work in a company chances are that reading this book will open your eyes - and the deficient marketing practices and priorities that you see will blow you away. This book is written without the stodgy business speak.

Enjoy

This book is well written and a must read for a marketer or advertiser. Its focus is on what you must do to keep your customers AFTER you have them. Goes way beyond tired old books on customer service. I recommend it

I strongly recommend this book to anyone involved in measuring customer satisfaction, including market research practitioners. It takes the reader on a logical journey from the theories of customer satisfaction/loyalty to the practical realities of conducting a meaningful survey that provides useful and valid information. There are lots of up-to-date examples of scales, analytic procedures, and best practices. I have at least 10 Post-Its in my copy, and expect the book to become well-worn as I am referring to it constantly.

This book's premise seems simple enough. The 2000 ISO:9000 standards differ from previous ISO:9000 standards in that they require a greater focus on the customer. Companies going for certification need to demonstrate that they have systems in place for identifying customer needs, measuring the extent to which those needs are being met, and making improvements where necessary. At first glance, this book appears to be an attempt to help companies qualify for certification by explaining how to measure customer satisfaction in a way that satisfies the standard.

In an apparent attempt at simplification, the implicit assumption is made that the reader knows nothing about ISO standards or customer satisfaction measurement. Since customer satisfaction measurement relies on an understanding of research methods and statistics, there seems to be a similar assumption that the reader might not know anything about those either. And that's the crux of the problem. ISO standards, customer satisfaction, research methods and statistics are all big topics in their own right and deserving of at least a full book's worth of explanation.

I'm not sure that any single book could do justice to all of those topics simultaneously, but I know this one does not. I suspect that the amount of detail included would overwhelm a person who truly didn't know anything about any of those topics before picking it up. On the other hand, the book does not provide enough detail to be useful to those who do have knowledge of at least some of the topics. Also, the fact that so much is included would make it easy to lose the forest among the trees. For example, the section on reporting results is longer than the section on identifying customer requirements, but of course if you've done a bad job on the latter, the former is a waste of time.

To make matters worse, the book is cluttered with boxes and lists named things like 'step-by-step' and 'checkpoints.' These are interspersed throughout the text, and while they may have been an attempt at clarity or simplicity, the result is just the opposite. They make the book seem even more disjointed.

If you just want to know about measuring customer satisfaction, you would be much better off buying the book with that title by James H. Myers. If part of your reason for wanting to know about measuring customer satisfaction is to put systems in place to meet the ISO standard, you would be better off buying the Myers book plus one of the more recent general books about the ISO standards (since customer focus was one of the major changes to the standards, all new ISO books discuss this issue).

There is a single sentence in the new ISO 9001:2000 requirements that makes this book essential: "Customer perception, as to whether customer requirements have been met, shall be monitored". This book's sole purpose is to provide you with ISO 9001-friendly techniques for meeting the requirements in that sentence. The author provides a clear, 7-step process for tackling that daunting task:

(1) Identify your customers.
(2) Identify their requirements. (Maps to ISO requirements 5.2, 7.2.1).
(3) Determine what you're going to measure, and how.
(4) Measure satisfaction based on step 3. (Maps to ISO requirement 8.2.1).
(5) Analyze the data. (Maps to ISO requirement 8.4).
(6) Report the results.
(7) Communicate the results and employ continuous improvement methods. This complies with the change from the 1994 version in that continual improvement is now required, where it was only implied in the 1994 version.

What makes this book so valuable is that it reduces the complexities for meeting each of the requirements using the process to a series of steps in each process stage. Each chapter contains a summary of the goals, then gives step-by-step procedures needed to attain the goals, and identifies the deliverables that must be produced. This sounds simple on the surface. In reality implementing customer satisfaction requirements management, measurement and continuous improvement is a complex undertaking that not only touches virtually all parts of an enterprise, but also mandates a change in corporate culture.

Additional value in the form of worksheets and checklists covered in the appendices (and provided in electronic format on the CD ROM) make this book absolutely essential to any company that is pursuing certification (or are re certifying under the 2000 version).

Additional features of this book include: the author's extensive experience in customer satisfaction management is condensed into this reasonably short book, the book layout makes it easy to follow and find information, and the straightforward manner in which necessary information is presented. This is the only book, to the best of my knowledge, that solely focuses on this aspect of ISO 9001:2000. Fortunately, it covers all of the essentials and leads you step-by-step through the process of meeting this important set of requirements. I personally believe that it's the key to getting certified under the 2000 requirements because of the scope and magnitude of effort that is required to comply with a seemingly innocuous requirement that can be a major barrier to achieving certification.