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 | | Customer Visits: Building a Better Market Focus by Edward F. McQuarrie ISBN-10: 0803946694 ISBN-10: 0-8039-4669-4 ISBN-13: 9780803946699 ISBN-13: 978-0-8039-4669-9 Hardcover 1993-09-10 Sage Publications, Inc Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description "The sequencing of chapters has been carefully done to bring out and develop the theme. The book moves smoothly from a lucid explanation and illustration of the concept to the analysis of visit data, customer visits vis-a-vis other market research techniques, and the history and future of customer visits.... Customer Visits seeks to motivate the interested reader to conduct visits to customers in a systematic manner. It is a work of its own kind and is a must for all those who want to know or practice more of close customer relationships." --Management and Labour Studies "It is rare that a book lives up to its stated objectives, but Edward F. McQuarrie, whose work has also been published in JPIM has done just that. . . .This book is written for business-to-business product and marketing managers as well as their manufacturing and technology counterparts, but its style and context are applicable to many other disciplines. . . .Its step-by-step approach and empirically generated examples are without equal." --Journal of Production and Innovation Management "Customer Visits describes an important business-to-business market research technique. . . . The philosophy underlying customer visits and the methodology outlined in the book are critical for practitioners, academic field researchers, MBA students, and professors who teach marketing research, business-to-business marketing, or relationship marketing. . . . It provides important details and describes specific procedures. Unlike many handbooks, it is engaging and parsimoniously written. . . . Knowing how to use customer visits will be an important addition to any manager's or engineer's toolbox." --Journal of Marketing Research "It is rare that a book lives up to its stated objectives but McQuarrie, whose work has also been published in JPIM, has done just that. . . . Throughout the book McQuarrie supports his teachings (and they are teachings) with specific examples taken from his vast experiences. He not only details, step-by-step, all the points necessary to assure that customer visits maximize the visiting firm's intelligence, but he also explains why each step needs to be taken and describes alternative paths to take if your information needs cannot be adequately satisfied through the customer visitation process. . . . He also does an excellent job of reinforcing his critical points and summaries. . . . The book reads like an excellent classroom lecture with all the logic, cautions, examples, and benefits one could hope for from such a course. As such it is an excellent tool for new marketers, MBA students, and those firms who market to end consumers through distributors or dealers. . . . Its step-by-step approach and empirically generated examples are without equal. Its application goes beyond just the BTB industry--it is equally valid for any organization that reaches the end user through a second or third party." --The Journal of Product Innovation Management "Edward F. McQuarrie has successfully integrated theory with solid practical experience to create a very informative and useful book. This is 'must reading' for any business manager who is serious about managing customer feedback and customer satisfaction." --Michael R. Kuhn, Senior Vice President, Burke Marketing Research, Inc. "Edward McQuarrie provides a practical guide for business teams to effectively plan customer visit programs. While the benefits of this exploratory market research tool are spelled out (power of face-to-face contact with customers, observation of customers' environment), so are the limitations and risks (small samples, interviewer bias). Dr. McQuarrie discusses a procedure for implementing programs that includes setting objectives, selecting a sample of customers, and training visit teams. He illustrates how to optimize customer visits to generate ideas, identify business opportunities, and in general, gain valuable market information." --Anne Morton, Market Research Program Manager, Hewlett-Packard Company "The customer visit program expertly described by Ed McQuarrie in Customer Visits is an important part of implementing two of Marketing Science Institute's priorities: improving the new product development process and improving the effective use of market information." --H. Paul Root, President, Marketing Science Institute Customer focus. Market driven. Total quality. All new terms, promising a new way of conducting business. But, how do you move an organization to make it more market driven? How do you organize product development so that real user needs are addressed? How do you change hearts and minds so that employees in all parts of the organization take responsibility for customer satisfaction? Drawing on the best practices found at leading technology firms, Customer Visits offers a complete guide to all aspects of planning and executing a customer-visit program--managers and engineers visiting the customer at their place of business. A wealth of specific advice is offered on topics such as the right and wrong kinds of objectives, how many customers to a visit, how to prepare a discussion guide, how to coordinate visits with the sales force, how to build rapport, effective and ineffective questions to ask customers, and traps and pitfalls in the analysis of data from visit programs. Every aspect of the book focuses on the manager who wants to act---now. Managers and engineers engaged in new-product development will discover a wealth of information-invaluable for finding out what customers really want. Executives charged with continuous improvement will discover a practical and cost-effective approach for motivating employees to focus on customer satisfaction. And marketing researchers, scholars, and students will be on the cutting-edge for the 1990s and beyond. | ||
Reviews | ||
Mandatory Reading for Product Development Professionals Edward McQuarrie is clearly skilled in the practical use of customer visits (on-site interviews) as a qualitative data collection tool, particularly for B2B products. His frequent citations of real-world studies that support investment in primary customer research are both useful and validating for industry practitioners engaged in new product definition. I gave this book 4 stars rather than 5 because it falls short in several areas that are important to prospective readers who may be working professionals looking for "a better way" to characterize customer needs. Customer requirements are only one (although arguably the most important) data point that influences new product definition. McQuarrie doesn't really position the customer visit method very well in the context of the other variables that drive overall product definition. Secondly, while the book does an excellent job describing how to go about planning and conducting customer visits, it fails to provide more than a cursory treatment of how to use the information collected to develop appropriate, useful, prioritized new product requirements in a resource-constrained environment. Other than these few items (which may be outside the focus of the text anyway), I would highly recommend this book. It provides valuable insight to understanding VOC (voice of the customer) and should be included in any serious product development professional's personal library. | ||
Practical McQuarrie obviously speaks from experience. His book is very practical, easy to navigate. Though, the most important attribute is that it is realistic. The author realizes the realities of the corporate environment and allows the reader to progress towards perfection rather that achieve perfection first time out. Ideal book for development teams. Many "how to" ideas and a logical progression. | ||
Good Ideas for Beginners and Advanced Alike I found this book to be quite easy to read and also make many useful, hands on types of suggestions of how to set up, conduct and debrief customer interviews. More than that, it also gives you a recipe for starting from scratch if you need it - that is, identifying what your purpose is, who you're going to interview, who should be doing the interviewing from your side (e.g. the Company's 'team'), how to conduct the interview and what to do once you've completed it. For those of you who are already familiar (or even comfortable) with Customer Visits, this book will still give you interesting and useful pointers - such as how to go about getting agreement from the customer to tape an interview and why this could prove invaluable to you in the future. In short, it's not a 'tour de force' for Customer Visit/Marketing junkies, but will surely give even those folks some good information that you can use. For the rest of us, it's quite a useful 'how to' book to start out with. | ||