Birth of an Evangelist

There have been only a handful of books I’ve read where I was compelled to seek out the author(s) to say, “thanks.” Creating Customer Evangelists was one such book.

I read Creating Customer Evangelists in December 2002 and was so impressed with the strategic premise and with the tactical advice on how to implement the ideas presented in the book that I had to seek out the authors, Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. After making contact with Ben, he suggested (as any good evangelist provocateur would suggest) that I submit a review to Amazon. I did just that … I evangelized the book on Amazon.

From there, I evangelized the book to my then Starbucks marketing peer and current marketing coroner peer, Paul Williams. It was at that time that I left Starbucks for Whole Foods Market and Paul was left to evangelize the book within Starbucks.

With John’s recommendation, I too read the book and afterwards reached out to Ben to keep the lines of communication open in case an opportunity arose.

That opportunity came when I kicked-off a customer service focused project with a Starbucks leadership team and needed a speaker who would inspire and inform our team to the concept of … not just 'happy' customers, not just ‘satisfied’ customers, and not just ‘highly satisfied’ customers – but customers who are so enthusiastic that they are evangelical.

Ben presented the Creating Customer Evangelists tenets from the book as well as shared relevant case studies form other like-minded company to an impressed Starbucks leadership team. Following the conference, the attendees have been sharing the ‘customer evangelist’ message with their local teams by arranging field trips to visiting and witnessing how the companies profiled in the book and in the presentation deliver great service experiences that lead to creating customer evangelists.

A year after John read the book he is still spreading the customer evangelist gospel.

That's right Paul, this past January I introduced Creating Customer Evangelists within Whole Foods Market. And now, Paul and I have are continuing to spread the good word about Creating Customer Evangelists on the Business Blog Book Tour 2.