Review of Creating Do-It-Yourself Customers: How Great Customer Experiences Build Great Companies (Hardcover)

I have just finished reading "Do-It-Yourself customers" which I consider as an outstanding piece of work on the relationships between customer experiences, customer performance and companies' performance. Specifically, the four dimensions of co-production experiences are clearly explained, well-argued and illustrated by many examples. They constitute a framework for developing any customer-performance oriented strategy.

If the managerial interest of this book is evident, I also would like to stress, as a researcher in marketing, its strong academic relevance. This book brings insightful streams of research which can contribute to better understand the profitability of marketing actions.

I made a doctoral research on the effects of customer education on customers' and companies performance. I had the opportunity to empirically verify certain ideas defended by the authors in their book, specifically in chapter 8 "enhancing expertise". The authors argue that developing customer expertise becomes a competitive strategy. They suggest for instance that customer education can increase customer satisfaction. Through the empirical investigation I have carried out on users of complex products, I was pleased to validate such ideas. Customers who improve their usage-related skills, become intense users of their products and are more satisfied with this product.

To conclude, I would make a parallel with the paper "Defeating feature fatigue" written by Roland T. Rust, Debora Viana Thompson and Rebecca W. Hamilton published in the February 2006 issue of the Harvard Business Review. The authors reported that 9% of buyers of home networking product returned their product. They precised that (page 104): "only 15% of the returns were the result of broken or defective products; most of the remaining returns were simply because people couldn't get the equipment work"
As such phenomena arise also for basic products or simple services, the propositions of Peter C. Honebein and Roy F. Cammarano to increase customer performance are more than insightful.

Many thanks to the authors for this book which I had great pleasure to read.


Product Description
More than 65 percent of Southwest Airlines' customers book tickets themselves on southwest.com. The self checkout available in more than 1,000 Home Depot stores contributed to a 7.3 percent increase in the average customer transaction. Customers are creating do-it-yourself teddy bears at Build-A-Bear® Workshops and designing do-it-yourself shoes at nikeID.com. Everyday, new ways of involving customers in businesses are emerging, evolving, and gaining wider acceptance.Customer satisfaction is high in these do-it-yourself experiences because customers save time, have more control, and achieve self-made results. In Creating Do-It-Yourself Customers: How Great Customer Experiences Build Great Companies, veteran business consultants Peter C. Honebein and Roy F. Cammarano show anyone who serves customers, from CEOs to frontline associates, how to lead the creation of truly outstanding customer experiences.

This book justly emphasizes that for customers to perform, businesses must wrap their goods and services with performance-enhancing experiences. Customers need vision so they know what they are expected to do. They need access to tools that enable them to perform. They need incentives to motivate desired performances. And they need expertise so they can perform tasks competently. The authors call the orchestration of these four strategies a coproduction experience, and it forms the foundation for how businesses create do-it-yourself customers.

Through the principles of customer codesign, cocreation, and coproduction, business owners, leaders, and employees can champion the ideals of great experiences for customers and become leaders in the do-it-yourself economy. The results are clear: greater customer satisfaction, trust, loyalty, and lifetime value-the cornerstones of a great company.

About the Author
Peter C. Honebein, Ph.D., is a business consultant and experience designer. He specializes in designing systems and experiences that launch innovations and improve the performance of employees and customers. Peter has created products such as the DTP Advisor (Broderbund Software), designed a system that tracked the cleanup of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and consulted on the design of more than 40 products, including the system that sequenced the human genome. His industry experience spans advertising, banking, biotechnology, civil engineering, computer hardware, gaming, government, retail, software, telecommunications, and transportation.

Peter is an adjunct professor at Indiana University and the University of Nevada, Reno. He is author of numerous articles and the book Strategies for Effective Customer Education.

Roy F. Cammarano is a business consultant and formerly division president with Premiere Global Services (NYSE: PGI). Additionally, he has led three Inc. 500 companies and was an executive officer and consultant in the publishing, leisure, retail, and consumer product industries.

As a senior executive, Roy specializes in leading high-growth, dynamic environments. He has experience in nearly all operational functions, including creating strategic business and action plans, designing and formalizing systems that support plans, developing and managing human assets, and directing the financial functions of the organization.

Roy has been a contributing editor to Success magazine, was a featured speaker at Inc. magazine's business conferences, and is the author of the award-winning book, Entrepreneurial Transitions

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