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Summary: The best intro to developing a customer-centric business.
Review: Patricia Seybold has written what has to be the most intelligent introduction to developing a truly customer-centric business. This is one of several required texts in the e-commerce course which we teach to all our company's employees and customers.
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Summary: Awesome!
Review: This is one of the best BUSINESS books I have ever read. This book looks at eBusiness from the executive managers perspective.
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Summary: The Best of e-commerce
Review: There is no doubt, buy this book if are interested in e-commerce or anything about customers.
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Summary: Com: Dot or Not
Review: Seybold examines "the best practices for electronic commerce and electronic business today on the Internet and beyond" to enable her reader to "walk behind the scenes at more than a dozen pioneering companies -- companies that have committed themselves to doing what it takes to make it easier for their customers to do business with them." I was fascinated by her "insider" information about e-commerce, of course, but also by the correlations she suggests between e-commerce strategies and strategies for marketing and sales unrelated to the WWW. The strategies are often quite similar...if not the same. For example, greeting visitors to a website shares much in common with greeting those who enter a retail establishment in a mall. In both situations, ease and convenience are critically important to attracting traffic; hospitality gives customers a feeling of being welcome, indeed appreciated. Obviously, the website is a unique environment within which to establish and nourish customer relationships but customers in any environment are still human beings with certain expectations, requirements, and sensitivities. Those now involved or about to become involved in e-commerce will learn a great deal from Seybold's book. I also recommend this book to everyone else for whom customer loyalty is also absolutely essential.
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Summary: Thoroughly enjoyable and informative!
Review: Despite the previous negative reviews, I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. It takes a somewhat novel perspective on web technology by refocussing the reader on the raison d'etre of web technology itself: serving customers better. Ms Seybold puts web technology in its proper place from a manager's point of view: a means to an end. She drives her point home with numerous anecdotes and helpful advice. Her emphasis on fostering community on the web site to enhance the customer experience is revealing and refreshing. Having served as Customer Services Manager of a small utility company for 3 years, I can appreciate the importance of her customer-first, top-down, starting-from-the-outside-in approach to web design and development. Admittedly, a more indepth coverage of the underlying technologies used in the success stories covered would have been quite helpful. But the book delivers what it promises: it provides a framework for re-aligning organizational thinking along the proven lines of strategy before structure. After all, what's the use of having a web site that shows off the state of the art but forgot to leave room for the customer.
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Summary: Customer.Con
Review: If you were expecting revelations then think again. This book is boring, lacks innovation, and plods from one topic to the next.I rekon the top reviews were written by family and friends. Waste of money. Give you money to charity and read the Wall Street Journal's Internet diairy for more substance.
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Summary: Nothing new
Review: This book does not have any insight that would be interesting to anyone who is currently working on their internet business. If you are into doing business on the internet, experience internet service as a customer and have a marketing background, nothing in this book is new to you.
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Summary: Save your time and money
Review: Customers.Com could have benefited from an editor with a sharper pencil; the book is about 250 pages too long. The information is useful enough, but not worth wading through the tedious presentation.
Rating:
Summary: Not very useful
Review: This book has very little useful information. There are a lot of fluffy, feel good stories but very little detail on how to make it happen. I wish the authors spent more time not in documenting history but in providing insight into useful guidelines that help build sophisticated e-businesses. As someone who spent the last three years building e-business companies, I can tell you that very little of what is in this book really applies in the real world.
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Summary: Take a Pass on This One
Review: Replete with consultant-speak, this book manages to pack lots of pages with very, very few useful ideas. It's astonishing that consultants like Ms. Seybold get away with this stuff, and that publishers buy into it. Let's face it, the primary task of consultants is to make things LESS clear, not more clear because they make money on their consulting fees, not on their books. They want to create confusion, then charge you to clear things up. No thanks...
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