CRM Author John Todor's Book Discusses CEM, Addicted Customers

Silverado Press has announced the publication of a new book by John I. Todor, Ph.D., titled Addicted Customers: How to Get Them Hooked on Your Company, now available in printable eBook format.

How do you get customers hooked on your company? Todor's book gives some guidelines, beginning with some fundamental psychological principles for building trust and loyalty in business relationships.

Addicted Customers is part of what's being called Customer Experience Management (CEM), evidently the CRM buzzword's lived past its shelf life, because contentwise there isn't any appreciable difference between CEM and what we've been doing in CRM for years.

The differences are of emphasis: CEM practitioners typically place heavy emphasis on making the selling environment more appealing, which is an essential first step. Todor adds a psycho-economic framework to enhance these pursuits, and shows, through many examples, why companies need to recognize the "emotional power of the customer experience."

It's all over the news these days -- well, at least the kind of news this reporter reads. Recently Sabre Airline Solutions and ResponseTek Networks Corp. have announced a partnership to introduce Sabre Customer Experience Manager for airlines worldwide.


Sabre Customer Experience Manager routes customer feedback directly to those who are accountable, theoretically helping airlines to resolve issues, make improvements and assure overall quality of products and services.

"Airlines have historically had some of the lowest customer satisfaction scores across all industries," said Ed Thompson, VP Distinguished Analyst, CRM, for Gartner (News - Alert). "Their success is heavily dependent on delivering a positive customer experience. Setting reasonable expectations, delivering on those expectations, and then collecting real-time feedback in order to learn from customers will be the key mechanism for improving the customer experience."

Addicted Customers spends time providing a "strategic platform to apply CEM to product/service consumption," the aspect of experiences Todor considers "critically important to customers." According to Todor, loyalty accrues because customers value not just what the company has done for them, but what the relationship can do for them in the future.

While the implications of emotional and consumptive value might seem most obvious in the business-to-consumer sector, Todor argues that the strategies are equally powerful in a business-to-business context.

Addicted Customers is available now as a printable eBook at (www.AddictedCustomers.com/ebook). The printed version will hit Amazon.com (News - Alert) and other book purveyors on October 30th.

John I. Todor, Ph.D., is the Managing Partner of The Whetstone Edge, LLC, a customer experience consulting and training firm that applies scholarly research on human behavior to buyer-seller dynamics including customer loyalty, trust, retention, customer service, CRM and marketing strategy.

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

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