E-Service: 24 Ways to Keep Your Customers--When the Competition Is Just a Click Away

Abstract

From the Book: Some version of the line, book is the product of many hands and minds graces the acknowledgments page of just about every book we've ever read. don't know how true that may actually be for those other books, but for this one, it is true in spades and aces. The research, writing, and building of this book, is without fear of overstatement, a fantastic act of team work! From the people at AMACOM who threw away the time-tested guidelines and asked, When does it need to be in the marketplace? instead of declaring, This is how long it takes to bring a book to market, to the people at Maryland Composition who made the production process a high-speed interactive delight, to the researchers at Selah! Inc., the mystery shoppers at Shop 'n Chek who dared to plow new ground, and the analytical geniuses at ParaMetrica, Inc.-we are indebted. Spectacular! We aren't just the two names on the cover. We is a five-person team who wrangled and fussed over every sentence, word, paragraph, and idea in this book as if they were precious human newborns, composed of Tom and Ron; Sarah Fister Gale and Dave Zielinski, two overachieving, tech-savvy journalist/writers of immense talent; and Jill Applegate who not only coordinated the research and writing, but strung the text together in a single package, surfed the Web tirelessly looking for exceptional sites, secondary sources, cases, and data. Not to mention being ground zero for all the communication it took to pull things together and keep them running smoothly. All that said, we need to thank some other very specific players and acknowledge their contributions.There's Lindsay Willis of Selah! Inc., who made/makes our focus groups rich resources. April Vitale of Shop 'n Chek, who put together and managed a championship of professional mystery shoppers. Dr. Jeff McLeod of ParaMetrica, Inc., who made the loyalty/profitability metrics a reality. Ellen Kadin of AMACOM who championed our requests for speed and took our delays and machinations in stride without losing a single kidney. Helen Powers of Maryland Composition was flawless in interpreting what we were trying to do with every graph and image-regardless of how vaguely we expressed it. And we absolutely must mention the generosity of John Goodman of e-Satisfy.com, Lauren Basham of SOCAP, Gene Camera of BizRate, and Jean Kong of Forrester Research in allowing us to see and report on their cutting-edge e-commerce research. Others who put energy into this book-either directly or indirectly-include our partner Chip Bell, Allyson Campa, Edward Dubrawski, Jamie Rapperport, Penne Allen, Lynn Neillie, Karen Revill, Beth Brown, Mike Grasee, David Hochberg, Rich Takata, Bill Bass, Brett Astor, Mark DeChambeau, Scott Anderson, Sharon Bargas, Mike Guerra, Jerry McLaughlin, Donald Bielinski, Ron Paulson, Lisa Huckleberry, Soon-Chart Yu, John Prokopiak, Paula Noack, Doug Sundheim, Kathy Ferrante, Elise Dann, Dale Veno, Meg Colgate, Cindy Grimm, and Cheryl Gracie. thank you all for your time and effort. couldn't have done it without you. And no list of acknowledgments would be complete without thanking Susan Zemke and Pam Dodd for their forbearance and wise advice on the progress of this project.

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