Rating: 
Summary: Substantiating soft efforts for loyalty with hard figures
Review: “Loyalty is dead” begins this classic about loyalty. But after you’ve read this book, you'll know that pursuing loyalty pays off. The authors show you many ways to measure the profit of loyalty. Not only is employee loyalty important but also the loyalty of customers and investors. The first step is to build up a set of values for your company. This core task can't be delegated; it must be done by CEOs themselves. Loyalty can't be managed; it must be earned. The book contains many examples of how large companies have done this. What I like most about this book are the hints for substantiating “soft” efforts for loyalty with “hard” figures. Most of the time the authors argue for a focus on the long term. Loyalty-based management is hard work. This is the right book to get you started.Peter Pick
(...)
Rating:
Summary: For those who think there is no such thing as loyalty!
Review: For those who think loyalty cannot be attained by either your customers or your employees, think again. This book shows you how to acquire loyalty throughout your organization as intense as any Marine has for the Corps. Well worth reading, especially for the doubters and skeptics out there.
Rating:
Summary: For those who think there is no such thing as loyalty!
Review: For those who think loyalty cannot be attained by either your customers or your employees, think again. This book shows you how to acquire loyalty throughout your organization as intense as any Marine has for the Corps. Well worth reading, especially for the doubters and skeptics out there.
Rating:
Summary: Superb demonstration of the relevance of loyalty in business
Review: Frederick Reichheld masterfully shows the reader the subtle interactions between customer loyalty, employee loyalty and investor loyalty. The vast majority of companies do not know the cash value of loyalty because they rely on traditional accounting tools that do not give them a complete picture of costs and value attached to customers, employees and investors. Loyalty leaders, though they consider profitability important, do not pursue it as a short-term goal to be reached at any cost to please anyone interested in their financial performance. They deliver superior value to their customers, employees and investors by convincing them that loyalty performs at its best when it is mutually beneficial over time. The loyalty web that those firms spin is socially complex and thus likely to be costly to emulate. Competitors of loyalty leaders do not have a chance to achieve superior performance if they adopt a piecemeal approach to loyalty. Frederick Reichheld gives would-be loyalty leaders a framework to build loyalty's leader strategy and tools to measure their progress on the road to success. However, like the builders of Rome, loyalty leaders did not master their craft overnight.
Rating:
Summary: Superb demonstration of the relevance of loyalty in business
Review: Frederick Reichheld masterfully shows the reader the subtle interactions between customer loyalty, employee loyalty and investor loyalty. The vast majority of companies do not know the cash value of loyalty because they rely on traditional accounting tools that do not give them a complete picture of costs and value attached to customers, employees and investors. Loyalty leaders, though they consider profitability important, do not pursue it as a short-term goal to be reached at any cost to please anyone interested in their financial performance. They deliver superior value to their customers, employees and investors by convincing them that loyalty performs at its best when it is mutually beneficial over time. The loyalty web that those firms spin is socially complex and thus likely to be costly to emulate. Competitors of loyalty leaders do not have a chance to achieve superior performance if they adopt a piecemeal approach to loyalty. Frederick Reichheld gives would-be loyalty leaders a framework to build loyalty's leader strategy and tools to measure their progress on the road to success. However, like the builders of Rome, loyalty leaders did not master their craft overnight.
Rating:
Summary: Why is something as vital as loyalty so hard to organise?
Review: I am fascinated between the connections between my writings (eg Brand Chartering handbook) on branding which I define as the business process of continuously building value added relationships with all core stakeholders and Frederick Reichheld's book "The Loyalty Effect - the hidden force behind growth, profits and lasting value". I interpret this book, as quoted from in Table below,
as providing independent chapter and verse on the lifetime purpose of marketing learning organisations. No matter that the brand itself is not mentioned in the index, no punch is held back in admonishing all who destroy a leader's position through their short-term customs.
Table of quotes from The Loyalty Effect
(pages 3/4)
"Today's accounting systems often mask the fact, but inventories of experienced customer, employees, and investors are a company's most valuable assets. Their combined knowledge and experience comprise a firm's entire intellectual capital. Yet these invaluable assets are vanishing from corporate balance sheets at an alarming rate, decimating growth and earnings potential as they go. In a typical (western) company today, customers are defecting at the rate of 10 to 30 percent per year; employee turnover rates of 15 to 25% are common; and average investor churn now exceeds 50 percent per year. How can any company be expected
to grow a profitable business when 20 to 50% of the company's most valuable inventory vanishes without trace each year? It's a nearly impossible challenge...A few companies - we'll call them loyalty leaders - have decided to forego the challenge by plugging the leaks in their balance sheets. These firms have discovered how to acquire the long-term loyalty of customers, employees, and investors and so have changed the fundamental economics of their businesses. While competitors struggle to generate growth and cash flow, these
companies thrive...(page 6) "It may sound as if loyalty and profits are in conflict. If business were a zero-sum game, that would be true; any given pay increase or price reduction would be a tradeoff against increased profits. Investors could make more money only at the expense of customers and employees, and vice versa. But business is not a zero-sum game, and the putative conflict is a misunderstanding. To resolve it, we have to break out of the snapshot mentality and recognise that there are two kinds of profit. Call the first kind
virtuous; it's the result of creating value, sharing it, and building the assets of the business. The word for the other kind of profit is destructive. Destructive profit does not come from value creation and value sharing; it comes from exploiting assets, from selling off a business's true balance sheet. This is a kind of profit that justifies terms like profiteering, gives business a black eye, and actually shortens the life expectancies of businesses that
seek it."
........................
The blossoming information age heralds an era of both unprecedented wealth production and of extraordinary organisational change. Against which a salient note of caution must be : how many of today's big companies will learn the new marketing-relationship game rules in time? How many will put Reichheld into organisation-wide effect and earn the well balanced loyalty of all their stakeholders? If your spirit is with Reichheld but your organisation isn't yet, we are rehearsing how to make the great changeover in time via free e-mail summits. For further info, please e-mail me .........................................................................................................Chris Macrae, editor of Brand Chartering Handbook & MELNET
www.brad.ac.uk/branding/ E-mail me at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
Rating: 
Summary: One of those rare business books that presents facts
Review: I must admit, I haven't read any other "leading loyalty" books so I don't know what I'm missing. However, I thought this book was excellent. Most business books are full of ideas and rhetoric and pulpit pumping sermons...all without any evidencial backing. This book provides facts to support it's claims. It also provides tools to help your own business. It does more than just say "loyalty is important and you should try harder."
Rating:
Summary: How to Achieve and Then Sustain Loyalty
Review: I read this book when it was first published and recently re-read it. Those who have checked out my reviews of other books which address many of the same issues already know that I have a bias with regard to "customer satisfaction" and "customer loyalty", agreeing with Jeffrey Gitomer and others that the former is wholly dependent on each transaction and the latter can end (sometimes permanently) because of a single unsatisfactory transaction. The objective for those who have customers (be they internal or external) is to achieve and then sustain their passion about doing business with you. You want them to become evangelists. Of course, Reichheld fully understands all this. In a brilliant essay which recently appeared in the Harvard Business Review, he shares new research which (again) shows that companies with faithful employees, customers, and investors (i.e. capital sources which include banks) share one key attribute: leaders who stick with six "bedrock principles": preach what you practice (David Maister has much of value to say about this in his most recently published book, Practice What You Preach), play to win-win, be picky, keep it simple, reward the right results, and finally, listen hard...talk straight. In this book, Reichheld organizes his material within 11 chapters which range from "Loyalty and Value" to "Getting Started: The Path Toward Zero Defections." With meticulous care, he explains how to devise and them implement programs which will help any organization to earn the loyalty of everyone involved in the enterprise. He draws upon a wealth of real-world experience which he and his associates in Bain & Company, a worldwide strategy consulting firm. Reichheld heads up its Loyalty Practice. In his most recently published book, Practice What You Preach, David Maister explains why there must be no discrepancy whatsoever between the "talk" we talk and the "walk" we walk. Reichheld agrees, noting that the "key" to the success of his own organization "has been its loyalty to two principles: first, that our primary mission is to create value for our clients, and second, that our most precious asset is the employees dedicated to making productive contributions to client value creation. Whenever we've been perfectly centered on these two principles, our business has prospered." It is no coincidence that the world's most highly admired companies are also the most profitable within their respective industries. I wholly agree with Reichheld that loyalty is critically important as a measure of value creation and as a source of profit but that it is by no means "a cure-all or a magic bullet." Loyalty is based on trust and respect. It must be earned, usually over an extended period of time and yet can be lost or compromised at any time with a single betrayal. Here are three brief excerpts: "One common barrier to better loyalty and higher productivity is the fact that a lot of business executives, and virtually all accounting departments, treat income and outlays as if they occurred in separate worlds. The truth is, revenues and costs are inextricably linked, and decisions that focus on one or the other -- as opposed to both -- often misfire." "Companies cannot succeed or grow unless they can serve their customers with a better value proposition that the competition. Measuring customer and employee loyalty can accurately gauge the weaknesses in a company's value proposition and help to prescribe a cure." "While every loyalty leader's strategy is unique, all of them build on the following eight elements: Building a superior customer value proposition, finding the right customers, earning customer loyalty, finding the right employees, earning employee loyalty, gaining cost advantage through superior productivity, finding the right [capital sources], and earning [their] loyalty." Who will derive the greatest value from this book? Decision-makers in any organization (regardless of size or nature) which has been weakened by defections among customers and/or employees. If the primary objectives are value creation and partnership, decision-makers in these organizations must never betray or neglect any of the fundamentals of loyalty-based management: "partnership builds incentive; incentive builds value; value builds loyalty; loyalty builds even greater value." It's as simple and (yes) as difficult as that.
Rating: 
Summary: Some good ideas ? but not applicable to everybody
Review: I would recommend the first half of this book (chapters 1-4 & 6) to any business manager or aspiring upstart. Reichheld's "customer lifecycle profit" and "customer value proposition" concepts provide a unique, innovative framework for evaluating your company's philosophies and strategies. The chapter on finding the "right" investor defies almost everything I learned in my MBA program. The second half of the book explains (in excruciating detail) how to set up measurement and incentive systems based on this loyalty-based framework. Unfortunately, the author only gives passing mention (in Ch. 10) to the fact that these systems are not applicable to many businesses, including technology firms and makers of commodity products. As an IT analyst in a paper company, I got little tangible benefit from Reichheld's discussions.
Rating:
Summary: Some good ideas ¿ but not applicable to everybody
Review: I would recommend the first half of this book (chapters 1-4 & 6) to any business manager or aspiring upstart. Reichheld's "customer lifecycle profit" and "customer value proposition" concepts provide a unique, innovative framework for evaluating your company's philosophies and strategies. The chapter on finding the "right" investor defies almost everything I learned in my MBA program. The second half of the book explains (in excruciating detail) how to set up measurement and incentive systems based on this loyalty-based framework. Unfortunately, the author only gives passing mention (in Ch. 10) to the fact that these systems are not applicable to many businesses, including technology firms and makers of commodity products. As an IT analyst in a paper company, I got little tangible benefit from Reichheld's discussions.
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