Handbook of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Measurement (2nd ed.)

Philip Calvert (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand)

The Electronic Library

ISSN: 0264-0473

Article publication date: 1 August 2002

627

Keywords

Citation

Calvert, P. (2002), "Handbook of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Measurement (2nd ed.)", The Electronic Library, Vol. 20 No. 4, pp. 336-336. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2002.20.4.336.2

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Many librarians mistakenly believe that their customers are “loyal” to their service. In fact, for most of the past hundred years or so, library customers have had little choice as to where to look for information or recreation in printed form, and this monopoly situation led to the impression that the library was giving great customer service. This situation is changing as we see competition arriving from the Internet and the online services it carries. Hill and Alexander have provided us with a detailed examination of the concepts of loyalty and commitment and come to the conclusion that most organisations are better advised to seek commitment from their customer rather than loyalty.

Much of this book is concerned with the practice of conducting customer satisfaction surveys. The authors make the point that organisations use a lot of staff time on planning, data collection and evaluation, but often run poor surveys that achieve very little. In the past librarians have been among the worst offenders at this, though there appears to have been some small improvement recently. The text covers practical aspects of a survey such as questionnaire design and analysis, sampling, interviewing skills and (often forgotten) techniques on reporting the results of a survey. Indeed, the chapter on questionnaire design is lengthy, thorough and practical. Some information managers will find the book worth reading for this chapter alone. One of the book’s five appendices gives several examples of customer surveys.

The authors describe an effective customer satisfaction process that follows a standard path including project planning, communicating with customers during and after the survey, internal feedback, and importantly, addressing the issues raised by the survey. There is a chapter on modelling and forecasting, two techniques that are rarely used by information managers, but perhaps they ought to be.

One of the disappointments of the book is that it concentrates so much on surveys that other methods for gaining and retaining customer commitment get little attention. Having a good complaints procedure, for example, is often recognised as good for customer satisfaction but it is not dealt with here, except briefly on p. 237.

There is a thorough bibliography to this second edition (the first was published in 1996 and was very successful). The new edition contains extra material on measuring customer satisfaction. Although it is relatively narrow in focus, the treatment of customer surveys is one of the best I have read. Recommended to information managers wishing to examine customer commitment to their organisation.

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