Customer satisfaction is worthless, customer loyalty is priceless

by Jeffrey H. Gitomer

To longtime sales and customer-service pro Jeffrey Gitomer, boasting about a near-perfect customer-satisfaction rating of 97.5 percent is a major mistake. "That means 2.5 percent of your customers are mad and they're telling everyone. And 97.5 percent of your customers will shop anyplace the next time they go to market for your product or service." Based on a philosophy that's been developed through his syndicated business columns and the more than 150 seminars that he gives each year to companies such as Radisson, Sony, NationsBank, and Time Warner Cable, the book outlines his formula for making customers so faithful they "will fight before they switch--and they will proactively refer people to buy from you." Regularly employing oversized type in screaming bold fonts to grab the reader's attention, Gitomer breathlessly recounts his start-to-finish approach to becoming "memorable" to consumers along with illustrative tales of his own encounters with particularly egregious examples of p