Recommended Reading 2

THE RELATIONSHIP-BASED ENTERPRISE: 
Powering Business Success Through Customer Relationship Management
Ray McKenzie  
This book not only does an outstanding job of defining CRM (finally) and uncovering the basic concepts involved in CRM but also provides simple, well-organized frameworks for even the uninitiated to pursue. It takes senior management away from the current “IT silver bullet” thinking about CRM and positions it at the business strategy level.

CRM AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT: Capturing and Keeping Customers in Internet Real Time
Paul Greenberg 
I have read a lot of books and white papers on CRM and eCRM but this is the one that stands out for me. A lot of what I have read on CRM comes across as marketing vapor-speak but Greenberg's book manages to get the core concepts across in a clear and convincing manner. Coming from a background in digital media, I found it particularly useful to hear his take on CRM versus eCRM and how the two have evolved and are coalescing. A reasonable chunk of the book is dedicated to evaluating some of the major CRM players, which though interesting and valuable at the time, risks dating quickly in this fast evolving field. 

JUST ENOUGH CRM
Francoise Tourniaire  
Just Enough CRM gives decision-makers practical insight for planning, designing, and deploying CRM systems that deliver on their promises--and for avoiding the pitfalls that cause so many CRM implementations to fail. Leading CRM consultant Francoise Tourniaire shows how to streamline and improve every phase of the project lifecycle, from needs assessment and vendor selection through metrics, and beyond.

THE CRM HANDBOOK: A Business Guide to Customer Relationship Management
Jill Dyche 
Dyché devotes some of her (fairly slender) volume to CRM background information but quickly gets to the issues that managers confronted with CRM decisions need to consider. She makes great use of bulleted lists, scorable quizzes, and checklists (sections about what questions to ask vendors, and why, are particularly good) that you can use right now to gauge any organization's suitability to CRM and determine how they need to change in order to get the most out of their systems.

BUILDING DATA MINING APPLICATIONS FOR CRM
Alex Berson, Kurt Thearling, Stephen J. Smith  
A very good book that includes chapters on business value and business case for an enterprise wide Data Mining solution. Can be used to educate marketing/sales/operations executives about data mining concepts and principles. Unless there's an executive buy-in, the concept will not sell in an organization. Business values and business case chapters will help one is selling this concept to higher-ups and help associates understand data mining in theory.

ACCELERATING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS: Using CRM and Relationship Technologies
Ronald S. Swift 
This book is an indispensable read and reference for the business manager or technology manager that is teamed together. The author has brought together data and information from a very wide variety of sources - and added to it a substantial treasure trove of case studies. It is very real world. The sample project plan and methodology can be applied in many environments.
The case studies and biblography alone are well worth the acquisition price.

PERMISSION MARKETING: Turning Strangers Into Friends, and Friends Into Customers
Seth Godin, Don Peppers
Seth Godin, one of the world's foremost e-marketers, wrote a book on one of the fundamental principles of e-loyalty: you have to have permission to start a relationship. Once a customer volunteers his or her time, you're on your way to establishing a long-term relationship and making a sale.

UNLEASHING THE IDEAVIRUS
Seth Godin, Malcolm Gladwell
Taking up where his previous book Permission Marketing left off, Godin explains how ideaviruses have been launched by companies such as Napster, Blue Mountain Arts, GeoCities, and Hotmail. With great handles such as "sneezers" (influential people who spread them), "hives" (populations most willing to receive them), and "smoothness" (the ease with which sneezers can transmit them throughout a hive) you'll enjoy this book as much as value it.

E-SERVICE: 24 Ways to Keep Your Customers When the Competition is Just a Click Away
Ron Zemke, Tom Connellan, Thomas K. Connellan
This book is packed with ideas and solutions that readers can implement immediately. E- Service explains how to: manage the customer's psychological experience; capture the right buyers--the ones who provide true profit--and earn their iron-clad trust; recover from mistakes in a way that retains at-risk customers and turns them into advocates; and design home pages, order forms, and other visual elements that attract users rather than frustrate them.

THE LOYALTY EFFECT: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits and Lasting Value
Frederick F. Reichheld, Thomas Teal
Contributor Reichheld, THE guru of loyalty ROI, analyzes not only employee but also customer and investor loyalty and demonstrates the measurable results that strong loyalties have on corporate profits. Reichheld proves why traditional accounting systems do not show the "loyalty effect" and offers gauges that do.

THE CLUETRAIN MANIFESTO: The End of "Business As Usual"
Christopher Locke, Rick Levine, Doc Searls, David Weinberger
This book will teach you how to carry on an intelligent conversation with your customers. It is the quintessential guide to writing for customers in a language that humanizes digital loyalty and builds relationships. Required reading for all web writers and all ad agencies.

CUSTOMER LOYALTY: How to Earn It, How to Keep It
Jill Griffin
Studies show that customer satisfaction does not equate with continued sales--it is the loyal customer who resists the competitor's tempting offers. This pragmatic guide outlines a savvy, seven-step process for turning prospects into customers and customers into loyal advocates.

CUSTOMERS.COM: How To Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet & Beyond
Patricia B. Seybold, Ronni Marshak (Contributor)
Lots of books have been written about how to do business on the Internet, but few can match the understanding and passion for making e-commerce work of Patricia Seybold's Customers.com. Patricia is an e-loyalty guru because she understands that any e-commerce initiative has to begin with the customer.

INTERNET WORLD GUIDE TO ONE-TO-ONE WEB MARKETING
Cliff Allen, Deborah Kania, Beth Yaeckel
This comprehensive guide aims to help you successfully apply one-to-one marketing principles--developing secure relationships with customers--on the Internet. The book wades through all of the current interactive technologies--animation, 3-D, video, audio--and helps you distinguish what is useful to your site and what is just hype.

THE ENGAGED CUSTOMER : The New Rules of Internet Direct Marketing
Hans Peter Brondmo
In The Engaged Customer, direct marketing expert, Hans Peter Brondmo, walks you through the delicate web of successful email marketing that builds service relationships that the customer values. This book strategically guides you through the development and implementation of a successful email program using lots of real-life examples and practical advice along the way.

THE BUTTERFLY CUSTOMER: Capturing the Loyalty of Today's Elusive Customer
Susan M. O'Dell, Joan A. Pajunen
The Butterfly Customer defines the true meaning of customer loyalty and provides a master plan for achieving success. Authors Susan O'Dell and Joan Pajunen explain that a better measure of a customer's loyalty is how much trust they place in your business and include numerous examples of actual companies' actions  taken to capture customers' loyalty.

THE SURVEY RESEARCH HANDBOOK: Guidelines and Strategies for Conducting a Survey
Pamela Alreck, Robert Settle
This is the book I have used most heavily. It is a comprehensive practical reference that brings together the various techniques and principles, skills, and activities that are required to conduct an effective survey project. The volume is divided into four sections: planning and designing the survey; developing survey instruments; collecting and processing data; and interpreting and reporting results.

HOW TO CONDUCT YOUR OWN SURVEY
Priscilla Salant, Don A. Dillman
Leading experts show people with little training or experience how to conduct a meaningful but inexpensive survey. It explains how to determine whether you need a survey, select the best one for your needs, word questionnaires, train interviewers, as well as analyze and use data. It also describes common errors and how to avoid them and offers excellent advice on when to turn to a professional.
 

MEASURING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION:
Survey Design, Use, and Statistical Analysis Methods
Bob E. Hayes
This book  has some major strong points for those wishing to create their own customer satisfaction surveys. Its primary strength lies in its explanation of a structured approach to developing a reliable survey instrument. Hayes' book is also strong in showing how to apply statistical techniques to analyze the data generated by a survey. The book is strong on giving fairly detailed examples and all the instrument examples focus on customer satisfaction measure. The book is a little light on describing the full range of question formats and scales.

LISTENING TO THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER:
16 Steps to a Successful Customer Satisfaction Measurement Program
Jon Anton, Debra Sue Perkins, Debra Perkins
An invaluable resource, this how-to manual takes you step-by-step through the design, implementation and analysis of a customer satisfaction measurement program and shows how to develop your own customer satisfaction measurement program with actionable information to help your organization become truly customer-focused.

IMPROVING YOUR MEASUREMENT OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
Terry G. Vavra
Since more and more attention is being focused on customer value management, it is important to have a resource that synthesizes many bodies of research about how to obtain and interpret customer satisfaction data. Vavra provides rationale, identifies opportunities, and suggests specific programs to improve the measurement of customer satisfaction in your organization.
 

CUSTOMER SURVEYING: A Guidebook for Service Managers
Frederick C. Van Bennekom
Studies show that customer satisfaction does not equate with continued sales--it is the loyal customer who resists the competitor's tempting offers. This pragmatic guide outlines a savvy, seven-step process for turning prospects into customers and customers into loyal advocates.

ANALYSIS OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION DATA
Derek R. Allen, Tanniru R. Rao
This book is for advanced practitioners in marketing, contact center/customer care and other business and technical domains that need to gather and quantitatively analyze customer satisfaction data. The focus is customer satisfaction for services more than products, but it can be used effectively in either scenario.
The introduction covers prior work in the field and lays the groundwork for subsequent chapters that cover instrumentation, data preparation, an analysis framework and models. The key strengths of this book are the framework, which is highly structured, the models and exploratory data analysis.

DON'T MAKE ME THINK: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Steve Krug
This relatively short book is a gem of common sense. Krug makes the potentially complex problems of Web site usability accessible and easy to understand. If you have ever wondered what you are doing wasting your time in design meetings discussing what shade of what color a graphic should be, then this book will help you focus on what is really important in improving your site for your users. Everything Krug seems so obvious and yet revelatory. He speaks with the wisdom of someone who has used a lot of sites himself and has watched a lot of other people using sites. Starting from the premise that "people won't use your Web site if they can't find their way around it", Krug explains how people really use the Web, how to write for the Web, how to design the homepage and navigation, and how to do usability testing yourself. 

 CONTENT MANAGEMENT BIBLE
Bob Boiko
Unlike Krug's book, this one is long at almost 1,000 pages. But then again Content Management is a big subject and Boiko goes into every aspect of it in quite some detail. This is the most comprehensive book dedicated to content management that I have read. Despite its length, and some sections which are quite technical, it remains very readable and contains a good balance between the practical (processes, deliverables, checklists, forms and so on) and the more conceptual. The book begins by asking 'What is Content?' and then 'What is Content Management?' before moving into the main sections addressing how to do a content management project and how to build a content management system. 

WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT: A Collaborative Approach
Russell Nakano 
I did not get as much out of this book as I did from Boiko's book on content management. However, I did find it particularly strong and interesting when talking about how to organize development teams and development environments to suit the scale of initiative. As the title suggests, there is a focus on how to orchestrate collaborative development work, which is not easy but very important. The sections on workflow, how to handle multiple Web initiatives and how to approach globalization and localization are particularly good. 

MEASURING THE SUCCESS OF YOUR WEB SITE: A Customer-Centric Approach to Website Management
Hurol Inan  
This is the best book I have so far read on how to understand the success of your Web site. Hurol Inan, the author, spent eleven years at Andersen Consulting and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, which helps ensure that the focus is a commercial one and based on a wealth of experience. Furthermore, far from being too 'management consulting' to be intelligible and practical, the book addresses operational and implementation issues as well as giving enough technical detail without being overwhelming. Definitely worth a read. 

WEB METRICS: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success
Jim Sterne
Jim Sterne is a leading Internet marketing expert and has already published several books and white papers on online marketing and web metrics. The book promises to "explain the criteria for building a successful site, surveying the tools, services, techniques, and standards for Web measurement, and fully integrating those metrics with the customer experience". It is certainly comprehensive in the techniques and approaches that are reviewed, and the text is supported by some good case study material and real world insights. The book takes very much a marketing focus and skirts issues like content management, customer relationship management or implementation but if you really want to delve into the world of web metrics from a business and marketing point of view there is no better place to start. 

WEB PAGES THAT SUCK: Learn Good Design By Looking at Bad Design
Vincent Flanders, Michael Willis
Unless you're abnormally gifted, the best way to learn a craft thoroughly is to learn not only its central tenets but also its pitfalls. This book teaches Web design by pointing out ugly, misguided, and confusing sites--any site that fails to deliver good graphics and clear, well-focused content. You can't have e-loyalty with a site that sucks and these authors will help you avoid that.

THE ELEMENTS OF USER EXPERIENCE: User-Centered Design for the Web
Jesse James Garrett 
The Web was originally conceived as a hypertextual information space; but the development of increasingly sophisticated front- and back-end technologies has fostered its use as a remote software interface. This dual nature has led to much confusion, as user experience practitioners have attempted to adapt their terminology to cases beyond the scope of its original application. The most powerful idea in the book is the Garrett's 'elements' referred to in the title, which he defines as five planes or layers of experience - surface, skeleton, structure, scope and strategy. Garrett explains clearly and elegantly how user needs, content requirements, navigation design, visual design and other components fit into this 5-plane scheme.