Amaze Your Customers!

Citation

Parsons, A.L. (2007), "Amaze Your Customers!", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 24 No. 7, pp. 446-447. https://doi.org/10.1108/07363760710834889

What does it mean to amaze your customers and why should amazing your customers be a goal? Amaze Your Customers! offers some answers to these questions and provides a wide variety of examples of companies that both succeed and fail at amazing their customers. The book starts out by introducing a Mr Joe Friedmann, a businessman and father. Mr Friedmann represents the customer, and the rest of the book is told from his point of view. This book has four main parts:

1. 1.

   Amaze your customers!;

2. 2.

   Joe Friedmann's amazing experiences as a customer;

3. 3.

   You need to cheese a mouse; and

4. 4.

   And the winner is …

After introducing Mr Friedmann, the first chapter makes the distinction between actively and passively satisfied customers. Actively satisfied customers can give good reasons why they do business with a particular business while passively satisfied customers cannot. The author suggests that companies should want to have actively satisfied customers. From there the chapter makes several recommendations and provides examples of how to achieve this goal of having actively satisfied customers. Some suggestions include offering more than the customer expects, finding something unique about your business, trying to see your business from the eyes of the customer, being consistent in your service offering, making sure people know your company, thinking of yourself as a brand, and remembering to listen.

Throughout the first chapter, Zanetti encourages people to think like a customer and to try to identify expectations customers have about a business. In today's marketing world, people are always searching for different ways to learn about their customers. Although the book suggests interviewing people and making notes on their preferences and behaviors, more unique insights on how to determine customer expectations would be helpful.

Chapter Two offers many interesting anecdotes about Mr Friedmann's lackluster and amazingly good service encounters from around the world. As you read about them you find yourself recalling your own experiences. Interestingly, the names of the companies are not mentioned. Friedmann spends a great deal of time elaborating on his negative experiences but often gives much shorter descriptions of his positive experiences. His discussion is extensive, though, as it covers a wide variety of industries, including hotels, perfume, florists, doctors, airlines, cars, taxis, restaurants, trains, gas, hair salons, retirement homes, and supermarkets. The negative anecdotes illustrate that too few companies take the extra step that is needed to amaze their customers. However, the positive anecdotes seem to show that it does not take an incredible amount of effort to go above and beyond what customers expect.

Chapter Three discusses appropriate post‐service encounter behavior for customers. It first encourages the reader to let companies and employees know when they offered good service and then it provides some tips on how to do so effectively. For example, when complimenting someone, look them in the eye, do it immediately, spontaneously, and in your own words (p. 128). Positive feedback is always welcomed, and if you do not tell people about your experience they will never know if they are meeting their customers' needs and expectations. This chapter also gives suggestions on what to do when you encounter bad service. If you need to voice your complaint, address it to one person and address them by name, complain immediately and in a friendlyand pleasant tone, stick to the facts, and remember to thank the person for addressing your concern (pp. 129‐30).

The last chapter invites readers to nominate candidates for the Friedmann Customer Amazement Award. Candidates will be evaluated on degree of customer amazement, originality, customer orientation, the lasting effect of the strategy, practical relevance, advertising impact, cost‐value ratio, and uniqueness (p. 134). Missing from this chapter is a list of past winners and what they did to amaze their customers.

While the author does make a case for why companies should try to amaze their customers, more tangible evidence in terms of the bottom line is needed to back up his claims. Clearly happy customers are more desirable than unhappy customers, but answers to some of the following questions would be helpful to the reader: Are those companies that succeed at amazing their customers more profitable? Do they have more loyal customers? If it is beneficial to amaze your customers why don't more companies do it? Do they not think about it? Or do they not care about it? Or, do they just not know how to change?

Throughout the book the author mentions some tactics used to implement strategies, but a lengthier discussion about how to encourage employees to amaze their customers would be helpful. For example, in one of the discussions about the hotel industry the author mentions that employees tend to follow a script and often have difficulty diverging from the script. It would have been interesting to read suggestions about how to either change the script to make it more flexible or get employees to think and act beyond the script or to read examples of companies that have implemented more effective strategies.

This book was a quick read that was more practical than theoretical, thought provoking, and easy to understand. Most of the examples seemed to be business‐to‐consumer examples but the suggestions offered could certainly be applied to business‐to‐business marketing as well. I think any type of manager could use this book as a starting point for improving their service. It encourages the reader to think about and evaluate their own service experiences. Unfortunately, the result of doing so lead one to admit how underwhelming most service encounters really are. An interesting exercise for a manager after reading this book would be to become a customer of his/her business for a day to truly understand the customer's expectations and experiences. Results from the experience could be used as a starting point for brainstorming for ideas on how to improve current service policies and ultimately training employees how to do a better job of amazing their customers.