Rating: 
Summary: This book is terrific
Review: I love the practical ideas in this book on relating to your customers and creating customer evangelists. Here's a quote I like "Inside a business thriving with customer evangelists, evertyhing is designed to keep customers coming back." or how about "Customer evangelism is based on loyalty to people, not things." This book is filled with great marketing principles, some will find the ideas radical or new, others will find it just a terrific summary and presentation. I am recommending this book to everyone I know!
Rating:
Summary: Best Business Book of the Year
Review: I love this book! The information in this book is helping me more than getting my MBA. I have purchased nine copies to give to everyone I work with.
This book puts together pieces of information that we know as customers and individuals who network with many others. This book helped me realize how much I have turned to others for information for all the important decisions I have been making whether it is for a purchase, a job, a healthcare decision or a place to eat. This book is a serious compilation of research that deserves reading by everyone interested in how humans have reacted to the information age, not just marketers. Some of the book is overstated, but it is easier to digest than all the other dozen or so books in this field I have read.
Rating:
Summary: From a retail perspective
Review: I manage a retail store for a growing chain, and bought this book looking for ways to create my own BUZZ in the outlet I manage. Well, I found this book to be full of great ideas and strategies for my own situation. The profiles of different companies all have something to offer no matter what industry you work in. There are some real lessons to be learned - and more importantly, some very real ways to take action by following the example set by the books case studies. Great.
Rating:
Summary: Consider me an evangelist
Review: I read at least three marketing related books a month and I haven't dog-eared and chicken-scratched a book to the degree that I did with "Creating Customer Evangelists" in a long, long time. "Creating Customer Evangelists" is more than a great companion book to Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" and Emanuel Rosen's "Anatomy of Buzz." This book goes beyond the other books on buzz by outlining practical steps on how to organize your business, your marketing message and rally your customers to take advantage of word-of-mouth opportunities. I measure a marketing book by how many ideas it helps me generate. "Creating Customer Evangelists" generated more ideas than I can possibly follow-up on in 2003. If you are in a marketing-related field and are looking for ideas to make current customers more loyal and in turn, leverage those loyalists to spread the "gospel" of your company to prospective customers... read this book.
Rating:
Summary: It's nice to read a book that makes you shout out "YES!"
Review: I'm not sure how to put this... Ben and Jackie just "get it" when it comes to not only customer service, but business as a whole. I've never actually read a book before that made me speak to it out loud like it was a person. Every chapter I was saying things like "Brilliant!" and "Wow! Now that's what businesses should be doing". Smiling through the entire book, it not only talked about the concept of it, but gave great examples and THEN tells YOU how to do it in your business. Pure genius. Just buy it, period.
Rating:
Summary: The Power of Zeal
Review: Is this a book about marketing? Or about customer relations? Or about sales? Or about organizational growth? And now the correct answer: all of the above. What McConnell and Huba have accomplished in this single volume is truly impressive, at times stunning. They have consulted a variety of sources whom they gratefully acknowledge, such as Guy Kawasaki (who wrote the Foreword) as well as Emanuel Rosen, Richard Dawkins, Seth Godin, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, Richard Cross and Janet Smith, and Philip Kotler. However, McConnell and Huba are to be commended for formulating and then presenting their own cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective strategies by which to create "customer evangelists" who (in effect) become "a volunteer sales force." Just within the book's first five (of 16) chapters, McConnell and Huba answer questions such as these: 1. What are the attributes of customer evangelists? 2. What are the six tenets of customer evangelism? 3. Why are customer evangelists the ultimate salespeople"? 4. How to begin the process of creating customer evangelists? 5. What is "Customer Plus-Delta" and what are its "ten golden rules"? 6. What must any organization do to achieve its own Customer Plus-Delta? 7. What are the five key lessons to be learned from Napster? 8. What are the five myths and realities about buzz? 9. Why is a meme so important? 10. Which helpful hints will help any organization to create its own meme? Chapters 9-15 focus on HOW seven companies create "customer evangelists" who (in effect) become "a volunteer sales force." McConnell and Huba devote a separate chapter to Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, SolutionPeople, O'Reilly & Associates, the Dallas Mavericks, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Southwest Airlines, and IBM. The last chapter all by itself is well worth far more than the cost of this book. In it, "The Customer Evangelism Workshop," McConnell and Huba review all of their key points and then suggest HOW literally any organization can (after appropriate modification, of course) use the six tenets of customer evangelism as a framework for its own initiatives. The three appendices which follow are worthy of note: Appendix A examines uses and abuses of e-mail communications, Appendix B offers "8 Tips on Creating an Ideavirus for Your Business," and Appendix C suggests how to measure customer evangelism. I think this book will be of substantial benefit to decision-makers in literally all organizations (especially those with limited resources) who agree with McConnell and Huba that anyone within or associated with a given organization can -- and should -- help to "translate [its] value proposition into words the prospects can understand" as volunteers in its sales force. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out the sources listed in a brief but adequate References section. To those excellent sources I now presume to add Theodore Levitt's The Marketing Imagination; Bernd Schmitt's Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act, and Relate to Your Company and Brands; Michael Wolf's The Entertainment Economy: How Mega-Media Forces Are Transforming Our Lives; Jeffrey Shuman and Janice Twombly's Everyone Is a Customer: A Proven Method for Measuring the Value of Every Relationship in the Era of Collaborative Business; Stephen Denning's The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations; and David Maister's Practice What You Preach: What Managers Must Do to Create a High-Achievement Culture. To decision-makers in larger organizations, I also highly recommend Curt Coffman and Gabriel Gonzalez-Molina's Follow This Path: How the World's Greatest Organizations Drive Growth by Unleashing Human Potential as well as Carla O'Dell's If Only We Knew What We know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice.
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Summary: The Book Works! I'm Evangelizing a Book on Evangelism
Review: It seems fitting to be writing a review to evangelize a book written on the topic of making evangelists out of your customers. I can't help but think after reading Creating Customer Evangelists, "how can I let as many people as possible know how wonderful this book is!" I'd venture a guess that many of you reading this review have delved into a lot of business books in your lifetime. I'm sure that the best of intentions were taken into each book, only to find out that ½ way through the majority of them, they had lost their relevance and hadn't delivered on their promise. I mean, really, how many books about marketing can possibly have any really interesting and immediately helpful ideas? While CCE is not a fiction thriller, it will keep you as engaged as any good novel would, because at it's heart, it tells a lot of great short stories, and it tells them with insight and conviction. The book follows a "case study" approach and illustrates a world-class case example of a company doing CE right in each chapter. And, unlike those feel-good business books about how breakthrough something is that leave you hanging with no action items, CCE includes a full set of appendices on how you, yes you and your business, can get going on your CE efforts. The book lays out the process of creating customer evangelists in the following order:
1. Customer Plus-Delta (you need to be continuously gathering customer feedback)
2. Napsterize Your Knowledge (share and share alike, and freely, and not cheap crap either - put some good material out there!)
3. Build the Buzz (find the WOM networks in your industry and tap into them, not blatantly, but intelligently. Oh, and give to get. See principle #2)
4. Create Community (encourage your customers to mingle, either physically or virtually - build a coalition of customers around your cause)
5. Make Bite-Size Chunks (devise specialized, smaller offerings to get your customers to bite) The software industry uses this tactic with abandon. When's the last time you bought software w/ out a trial download?
6. Create a Cause (focus on making your world, industry, community, and company a better place because you were involved) These are easy enough principles to understand, but NOT_EASY_TO_EMBRACE. How many of you are prepared to "Napsterize" what you know to everyone in and around your industry? Really, how many? Do your marketing managers actually "participate" in the industry and community, or are you all a bunch of bystanders. Creating customer evangelists is about more than "implementing a few best-practices", this is not six-sigma, but there are ways to measure, and Ben & Jackie have an entire appendix devoted to those to! Are you ready to embrace your best customers as customer evangelists? Get the book - get the culture!
Rating:
Summary: The Book Works! I'm Evangelizing a Book on Evangelism
Review: It seems fitting to be writing a review to evangelize a book written on the topic of making evangelists out of your customers. I can't help but think after reading Creating Customer Evangelists, "how can I let as many people as possible know how wonderful this book is!" I'd venture a guess that many of you reading this review have delved into a lot of business books in your lifetime. I'm sure that the best of intentions were taken into each book, only to find out that ½ way through the majority of them, they had lost their relevance and hadn't delivered on their promise. I mean, really, how many books about marketing can possibly have any really interesting and immediately helpful ideas? While CCE is not a fiction thriller, it will keep you as engaged as any good novel would, because at it's heart, it tells a lot of great short stories, and it tells them with insight and conviction. The book follows a "case study" approach and illustrates a world-class case example of a company doing CE right in each chapter. And, unlike those feel-good business books about how breakthrough something is that leave you hanging with no action items, CCE includes a full set of appendices on how you, yes you and your business, can get going on your CE efforts. The book lays out the process of creating customer evangelists in the following order:
1.Customer Plus-Delta (you need to be continuously gathering customer feedback)
2.Napsterize Your Knowledge (share and share alike, and freely, and not cheap crap either - put some good material out there!)
3.Build the Buzz (find the WOM networks in your industry and tap into them, not blatantly, but intelligently. Oh, and give to get. See principle #2)
4.Create Community (encourage your customers to mingle, either physically or virtually - build a coalition of customers around your cause)
5.Make Bite-Size Chunks (devise specialized, smaller offerings to get your customers to bite) The software industry uses this tactic with abandon. When's the last time you bought software w/ out a trial download?
6.Create a Cause (focus on making your world, industry, community, and company a better place because you were involved) These are easy enough principles to understand, but NOT_EASY_TO_EMBRACE. How many of you are prepared to "Napsterize" what you know to everyone in and around your industry? Really, how many? Do your marketing managers actually "participate" in the industry and community, or are you all a bunch of bystanders. Creating customer evangelists is about more than "implementing a few best-practices", this is not six-sigma, but there are ways to measure, and Ben & Jackie have an entire appendix devoted to those to! Are you ready to embrace your best customers as customer evangelists? Get the book - get the culture!
Rating: 
Summary: a book whose time has arrived
Review: McConnell and Huba encapsulate the essence of leveraging existing customers into third party endorsers to the outside world. As a marketing consultant, I found this book an informative and enjoyable read with real-life examples of proven strategies to "spread the word!" Recommended to any company who is serious about growing their business via keeping the customer in mind.
Rating:
Summary: Brother McConnell & Huba's Customer Service Revival
Review: McConnell and Huba have compiled fascinating information, facts, stats and interviews with some the country's best customer service based businesses and compiled them all in one place for perusal. With ideas and motivation that can improve customer service for micro-business to mega-business, Creating Customer Evangelists shows how to bring back and implement the "corner store" feel in a global economy. From simply answering emails to purchasing millions of dollars worth of customer and employee incentives there is an idea that will work - or will spawn an idea that will work - for you.
Additionally, an interesting read for anyone interested in the development of the companies featured within the book (Krispy Kreme, Southwest Airlines, The Dallas Mavericks, Build-A-Bear Workshop, IBM, O'Reilly and Associates, and SolutionPeople). Finally, the appendix with its condensed "how-to" questionnaire is a great resource for really examining a business's level of customer and employee service, satisfaction, and commitment. Here is an easy-to-read marketing guide explaining how to create customer and employee satisfaction on a grand scale. That alone should justify the five stars.
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