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Hooked on Customers: The Five Habits of Legendary Customer-Centric Companies
"Talk is cheap." This cliché is often uttered by our parents, teachers, spouses, or friends to judge our personal defects and mistakes or to reprimand us when we are wrong. But it can also be a valid statement that can guide us to positive change in business.
The idea that what we do is more important than what we say is a fundamental truth. It applies in our personal lives and can extend into our professional lives and business enterprises. Learning to let your actions do the talking can be revolutionary to a company that struggles to create enduring customer relationships or lead its industry.
People who own operate, manage, or otherwise lead a company are always looking for ways to improve productivity, beat the competition, and ensure long-term success. Learning how to put words and ideas into action can be a key to success in the business world.
Hooked on Customers is not about finding the right words, whether labeled as a "strategy" or not. It is an insightful, highly informative book that propels businesses into action. It explores successful customer-centric businesses, examines the ways they execute their strategies, and provides practical recommendations for business leaders to more effectively outperform their competition.
A must-have for any business leader who wants to have a healthy relationship with customers, this book avoids the pitfalls that often plague others that offer business advice. Frequently, company leaders turn to consultants and other resources to recommend strategies that sound great but ultimately don’t have any real meaning because they are a series of words without a tie to actions.
Combining his own professional experiences working as a CEO with his extensive research and expertise as an international authority on customer-centricity, author Robert Thompson has identified the five routine organizational habits successful customer-centric businesses use when executing strategy. Legendary leading customer-centric businesses:
* LISTEN to their customers’ values and feedback.
* THINK about the implications of fact-based decisions on customers
* EMPOWER employees with the freedom they need to please customers
* CREATE new value for customers, without being asked
* DELIGHT customers by exceeding their expectations
Crucial to Thompson’s discussion of these habits is the premise that there are no quick fixes. Customer-centricity takes time, determination, and company-wide commitment. It must be maintained and constantly pursued to ensure that it becomes part of the fabric of a business.
In the end, the results are well worth it. Hooked on Customers helps leaders understand, adopt, and implement the five crucial habits so these leaders can achieve the results they need to enable their companies to not only survive in highly competitive, overcrowded markets but to dominate them, creating a legacy of success and inspiration along the way.
The idea that what we do is more important than what we say is a fundamental truth. It applies in our personal lives and can extend into our professional lives and business enterprises. Learning to let your actions do the talking can be revolutionary to a company that struggles to create enduring customer relationships or lead its industry.
People who own operate, manage, or otherwise lead a company are always looking for ways to improve productivity, beat the competition, and ensure long-term success. Learning how to put words and ideas into action can be a key to success in the business world.
Hooked on Customers is not about finding the right words, whether labeled as a "strategy" or not. It is an insightful, highly informative book that propels businesses into action. It explores successful customer-centric businesses, examines the ways they execute their strategies, and provides practical recommendations for business leaders to more effectively outperform their competition.
A must-have for any business leader who wants to have a healthy relationship with customers, this book avoids the pitfalls that often plague others that offer business advice. Frequently, company leaders turn to consultants and other resources to recommend strategies that sound great but ultimately don’t have any real meaning because they are a series of words without a tie to actions.
Combining his own professional experiences working as a CEO with his extensive research and expertise as an international authority on customer-centricity, author Robert Thompson has identified the five routine organizational habits successful customer-centric businesses use when executing strategy. Legendary leading customer-centric businesses:
* LISTEN to their customers’ values and feedback.
* THINK about the implications of fact-based decisions on customers
* EMPOWER employees with the freedom they need to please customers
* CREATE new value for customers, without being asked
* DELIGHT customers by exceeding their expectations
Crucial to Thompson’s discussion of these habits is the premise that there are no quick fixes. Customer-centricity takes time, determination, and company-wide commitment. It must be maintained and constantly pursued to ensure that it becomes part of the fabric of a business.
In the end, the results are well worth it. Hooked on Customers helps leaders understand, adopt, and implement the five crucial habits so these leaders can achieve the results they need to enable their companies to not only survive in highly competitive, overcrowded markets but to dominate them, creating a legacy of success and inspiration along the way.
223 pages, Paperback
First published April 22, 2014
1 person is currently reading
120 people want to read
About the author
Robert G. Thompson
1 bookBob Thompson is founder and CEO of research and publishing firm CustomerThink Corporation and editor-in-chief of CustomerThink.com, the world’s largest online community dedicated to helping business leaders develop and execute customer-centric business strategies. An author, keynote speaker and international authority on business management trends, he has been a thought leader in customer-centricity since 1998. His new book "Hooked on Customers" (April 2014) reveals the five habits of leading customer-centric firms.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 22, 2018
Good book that points out how important it is to be customer centric company in the long run. Customers are not stupid if you are there to just take, you wont last.
December 9, 2015
[Full Disclosure: I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads]
This is an excellent book for all levels of any organization, from front line employees to middle managers to members of the executive suite. At least from a retail perspective, the consumer is faced with a sea of sameness in the marketplace and customer service and an outstanding customer experience serve as true differentiators.
The five habits of extraordinary customer-centric companies of Listen, Think, Empower, Create and Delight driven by strong service focused Leadership are spot on. Execution of these habits and weaving them into the DNA of an organization undoubtedly will lead to superior financial results.
My major observation about this book and the five habits, and perhaps my major disappointment with this read, is the habits are obvious and common sense and that by the end of this book, no new ground has been broken. It felt like a new coat of paint applied to a seasoned home, like I'd been down this road before. The technologies have changed, the names of the companies referenced in the book like Amazon, Zappos.com and Cisco have changed over the years and new platforms like social media and CRM have emerged but the basic concepts discussed in this book are the same as they’ve been for years. These concepts make perfect sense and are applicable to all businesses or even non-profits, regardless of size or location, but execution and resource allocation to customer service will always be a huge challenge and constant struggle.
Customer service is a warm and fuzzy business attribute that intuitively everyone knows is important but does not stand up well to the traditional ROI measurements and is extremely hard to identify direct correlations to business results. CFOs and their finance groups hate it! If they can’t measure it, quantify it, monetize it or cram it into a spreadsheet, they have a very tough time buying into the concept. That is where the strong leadership comes in.
From what I’ve observed on the job and in the financial press, the Great Recession elevated the role of CFO and the relentless drive to enhance shareholder value even in the depths of the recession. Outstanding, delightful customer service is driven by employees. Employees are the largest variable expense of most organizations. During the Great Recession, unable to raise prices or drive unit volumes, cost cutting was very high on the corporate agenda and still is today. Employees are a very large variable cost. Customer service is the collateral damage as employee costs are aggressively and relentlessly reduced.
I would have liked to see more in depth discussion and advice about the qualities of leadership necessary to make customer service a ubiquitous part of an organization’s cultural DNA.
Be clear, the core message of this book is outstanding, spot on point and could be applied tomorrow with an extremely strong leadership structure in place that truly embraces these concepts. Perhaps the biggest challenge would be keeping the finance department at bay! The challenge is to balance the drive to lower costs with quantifying the role of outstanding customer service in driving top line sale growth and bottom line profitability.
The time and effort spent on this book is well worth it and the learnings are immediately applicable to your organization. Pick up a few copies for your team!
This is an excellent book for all levels of any organization, from front line employees to middle managers to members of the executive suite. At least from a retail perspective, the consumer is faced with a sea of sameness in the marketplace and customer service and an outstanding customer experience serve as true differentiators.
The five habits of extraordinary customer-centric companies of Listen, Think, Empower, Create and Delight driven by strong service focused Leadership are spot on. Execution of these habits and weaving them into the DNA of an organization undoubtedly will lead to superior financial results.
My major observation about this book and the five habits, and perhaps my major disappointment with this read, is the habits are obvious and common sense and that by the end of this book, no new ground has been broken. It felt like a new coat of paint applied to a seasoned home, like I'd been down this road before. The technologies have changed, the names of the companies referenced in the book like Amazon, Zappos.com and Cisco have changed over the years and new platforms like social media and CRM have emerged but the basic concepts discussed in this book are the same as they’ve been for years. These concepts make perfect sense and are applicable to all businesses or even non-profits, regardless of size or location, but execution and resource allocation to customer service will always be a huge challenge and constant struggle.
Customer service is a warm and fuzzy business attribute that intuitively everyone knows is important but does not stand up well to the traditional ROI measurements and is extremely hard to identify direct correlations to business results. CFOs and their finance groups hate it! If they can’t measure it, quantify it, monetize it or cram it into a spreadsheet, they have a very tough time buying into the concept. That is where the strong leadership comes in.
From what I’ve observed on the job and in the financial press, the Great Recession elevated the role of CFO and the relentless drive to enhance shareholder value even in the depths of the recession. Outstanding, delightful customer service is driven by employees. Employees are the largest variable expense of most organizations. During the Great Recession, unable to raise prices or drive unit volumes, cost cutting was very high on the corporate agenda and still is today. Employees are a very large variable cost. Customer service is the collateral damage as employee costs are aggressively and relentlessly reduced.
I would have liked to see more in depth discussion and advice about the qualities of leadership necessary to make customer service a ubiquitous part of an organization’s cultural DNA.
Be clear, the core message of this book is outstanding, spot on point and could be applied tomorrow with an extremely strong leadership structure in place that truly embraces these concepts. Perhaps the biggest challenge would be keeping the finance department at bay! The challenge is to balance the drive to lower costs with quantifying the role of outstanding customer service in driving top line sale growth and bottom line profitability.
The time and effort spent on this book is well worth it and the learnings are immediately applicable to your organization. Pick up a few copies for your team!
January 30, 2015
Great and successful businesses all have something in common; they are customer centric. In Hooked on Customers, Bob takes 5 habits and routines behaviors of customer centric companies and helps you to make them part of your daily organizational culture. Each chapter ends with a 'Food For Thought' section with questions to ask of the leaders, colleagues, everyone in the organization to gauge where you stand with each habit. It's a great resource that you will turn to again and again. I highly recommend it to any business with front line employees.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews