Book review: Managing the Customer Experience

I decided a couple of months ago that I needed to know more about managing customers. Not necessarily how do you sell, although some of that might be interesting, but more customer account management. Now this is a subject I’ve never really read about before so I was at a bit of a loss to know where to start.

So I hunted around the web a bit, read some Amazon reviews and eventually bought myself a copy of Managing the Customer Experience (Smith & Wheeler, 2002). This wasn’t so much buying a book by its cover as buying a book by review and publisher. Sadly this isn’t the book I wanted.

Rather than talking about how you find your customers, how you satisfy them, how you keep them happy and how you sell more to them it talks about the ‘Branded Customer Experience (R)’. I’m sure the Branded Customer Experience (R) builds to all the things I wanted but its an awfully long way around.

Perhaps the (R) has already given away part of the problem. The guys writing the book have a methodology to sell. Repeatedly uses a registered (R) term in the pages of a book comes across as really pretentious too. In fact most of the advice doesn’t seem that radical or different to what I would expect. I’m haven’t go any real insights from this book.

Plus, the Branded Customer Experience (R) is only concerned with business to business to consumer transactions, I’m more interested in business to business.

So after just two chapters I’m giving up on this book. I’m sure that its a good book if you are looking to create a Branded Customer Experience (R) but I’m not. And I still need to find a good book about customers.