Product Review

This Harvard Business Review Paperback, and its companion volume "Seeking Customers", provides valuable advice on how to increase profitability through improved marketing and sales management. "Keeping Customers" outlines seven management principles that contribute to a loyal customer base, including such topics as targeting the customer, the importance of quality, and the proper measurements that a business should use to gauge success. Other topics covered in "Keeping Customers" include maintaining the customer relationship after the sale has been made, developing a marketing strategy that keeps customers coming back, identifying opportunities to raise profit margins while lowering costs, designing customer services that deliver, developing an unconditional service guarantee that works, and making an "artful recovery" when a customer is dissatified. Contributors to "Keeping Customers" include Benson P. Shapiro, Theodore Levitt, John Quelch, James Heskett, and W. Earl Sasser, Jr.