Table of Contents
PRAISE FOR reinventing the wheel
Chris practical approach for balancing the art and science of service delivers exceptional customer experience. This book is a must-read for anyone seeking to maximize the value of lifelong customer relationships.
CODY PHIPPS, President and COO, United Stationers Inc.
Chris Zanes Reinventing the Wheel provides insights, proven practices, and anecdotal customer experience vignettes that demonstrate success by having a relentless focus on the Lifetime Value of the Customer. With an ever-increasing competitive market, where products and services are easily commoditized, Chris offers pragmatic approaches to consistently providing the best customer service experience resulting in improved loyalty and brand recognition.
JOE M. SHAHEEN, Director-General Manager, The Boeing Service Company
Reinventing the Wheel is a must and easy read... from a genuine real-life, world-class entrepreneur... who hugs and embraces each customer and turns each one into a client for LIFE!... Chris openly shares all his secrets of successlove his stories... a gem in every one of them. Anyone who believes that customer service is central to their business culture needs to read this book!
JACK MITCHELL, President, Mitchells/ Richards/Marsh and author of Hug Your Customers
The first time I heard Chris Zane speak about customer service and creating lifetime customers, it changed my thinking forever. Get ready for a similar experience as you read this book.
STEVE CHURCH, Senior Vice President, Chief Business Development and Process Officer, Avnet, Inc.
Chris Zanes boldand practicalapproach to cultivating lifetime customers holds valuable lessons for businesses large and small. Through a series of engaging stories, Chris shares his recipe for experiences that offer more than what customers expect. And he shows us how to build deep emotional bonds, even in the face of material price premiums. A fascinating read and an excellent testament to the power of customer centricity and unconditional service guarantees!
JULIE MOLL, SVP, Global Brand Strategy and Research, Marriott International
Blend an unrivaled entrepreneurial spirit, a passion for delivering quality service, a highly creative mind, and a big dose of street smarts, and what you get is Chris Zane. Reinventing the Wheel is a marvelous book that will teach you and inspire you.
DR. LEONARD L. BERRY, Distinguished Professor of Marketing, Texas A&M, and Author of Management Lessons from Mayo Clinic
Zanes relentless pursuit of building life-long customers by reinventing the wheel is truly inspiring. Watch out bike dealers of AmericaZanes may be coming to your town next!
ROBERT ZOLLARS, Chairman & CEO, Vocera Communications, Inc.
R
einventing the Wheel is an inspirational story of how to look beyond the horizon of instant rewards in order to plant the seeds of deep brand loyalty and customer lifetime relationships.
KIM GRAVELL, VP, Innovation & Strategy Management, Cardinal Health Supply Solutions
Reinventing the Wheel tells a story of linking extraordinary service to value for the customers, the Zanes employees, the communities it touches, and ultimately the culture and success of his business. It is hard to read the account of Zanes service journey without stimulating ideas for my business and my life.
CHRIS MELOCIK, Senior Vice President, Integration & Process Improvement, Republic Services, Inc.
Chris Zane, a hands-on entrepreneur, brings novel next practices to life and also demonstrates how to execute practices that others have only talked or written about. More than a case study, this book is a must-read for entrepreneurs, managers, marketers, and others wanting to grow their business through non conventional and truly innovative investments in customers.
STEPHEN BROWN, PhD, Professor and Executive Director, Center for Services Leadership, W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University
Reinventing the Wheel is the employee guidebook behind the outstanding success of Zanes Cycles. Chris Zane has shared his strategies to create customer experiences that establish lifelong customers and change the game for his competition. This book is full of examples that are relevant for both small and large companies focused on growth, customer loyalty and competitive differentiation.
STEVE CLARK, vice president, Siemens Industry Solutions
What is an archetype?
Chris Zanes Reinventing the Wheel provides a step by step business success roadmap for readers that will educate both the neophyte and the seasoned entrepreneur. His objective in this book is to share with the reader his secrets behind the Science of Creating Lifetime Customers.
The title and age-old phraseReinventing the Wheelmight seem like a clich to some, but in my estimation Chriss book is bound to become an archetype and ideal example of the how to do it for long-term customer-r elationship building in any business.
In writing this book, Chris taps his years of experience from his first bike shop in his teenage years up until today, where he has built a nationally recognized retail operation and distribution system used by some of Americas largest corporate organizations. He transitions from teaching you how to define your business to determining your strategy for a winning proposition to focusing on continuing improvement once your business model is working.
I have known of Chris and his achievements for years, yet this book was a joy for me to read and to learn from, advancing through each page on the Amazon Kindle with an anticipation and an appetite for more.
His combination of simple talk and sensible explanation, combined with true-life stories, makes his first book a simple read. I will keep Chriss Reinventing the Wheel on my desktop for my personal reference and to lend out to our companys future brand builders.
JIM ISSLER, President and CEO of H.H. Brown (a Berkshire Hathaway company)
With love to my wife, Kathleen,
who endlessly encourages and supports my passion;
to my sons, Ian, Charlie, and Oliver;
and my parents, John and Patricia, for their inspiration and
willingness to agree to such an unbelievable request
introduction
HOW MUCH IS one customer worth to your business? For me, its $12,500. That means that my average customer will spend $12,500 on my products and services over his or her lifetime, $5,000 of which is profit. Of course, the only chance I have of ever seeing that kind of return on the relationship is if that customer keeps coming back and back again. Better yet, I want customers to come back with their kids, their relatives, and five friends. To put it another way, I need to develop a trusting relationship with customers right from the get-goone that I hope will last a lifetimeso that they can see how passionate we are about what we do.
Although I may own Zanes Cycles, a bike shop similar to the one down the street from you, I consider myself to be in the experience business, not the selling stuff business. And what do I mean by that? Think about a seven-year-old kids first bike. With the power to pedal around the neighborhood all on his or her own, that two-wheeler, whether it has training wheels or not, probably represents the first real freedom that kid has ever experienced away from the parental grip. Or consider the guy who lives next door to you who wants to lose some weight. His bike is more than two wheels and a frameit really represents a weight-loss and feel-goodabout-himself program. Consider the retiree who uses her bike to explore all those national parks she never made time for while she was working. For her, that bike is like a passport to adventure. No matter how you look at it, we arent simply selling bikes but something much, much more exciting. But make no mistakeanyone can sell that kid or that newly retired woman a bike. Thats why we go about the whole process in reverse.