The Eternal E-Customer: How Emotionally Intelligent Interfaces Can Create Long Lasting Customer Relationships

This book has worthwhile insights for everyone. Say you've never been sure of the meaning of stickiness, haptics, chatter bots, or auto-cannabilizing markets. Or say you know all that and want some practical resources for finding emotionally intelligent interface (EII) components. Bergeron provides all that, and in an engaging style that is knowledgeable without being esoteric. He uses believable, real-world scenarios to make his points and illustrate one of the major complaints about e-business: its lack of warm fuzzies to make customers want to come back. The Eternal E-Customer explains how a properly used EII can create an emotional bond between a company and its customers, a bond that means customer loyalty and continued business. As Bergeron puts it, "If establishing a Web site is like having a child, then creating an emotionally intelligent Web presence is like raising a chld prodigy." After reading this book, managers should feel that they've done some graduate-level homework toward the future of business.

As a software developer who develops websites, since reading this book, there have been many times I've sat in a meeting wishing everyone else around me had read it as well. While reading it, I found myself nodding in agreement with much of what Bergeron says. Technical people and management as well as web designers should read this book (not to mention anyone who's in business at all, whether you consider yourself an e-tailer or not). There's a lot of insight that goes beyond web technology that should be useful to anybody.The material is presented with humor and ease such that you feel like you're having a conversation with the author. Beware that if you don't read this book, it's possible that your competition might have read it and could already be implementing some of its suggestions.

Excellent analysis of a complicated subject matter. I think the authors have made understandable and enjoyable reading out of a technical and complex subject, and that is why I think this book should be essential reading for people in this field, from execs to developers.

Emotionally Intelligent Interfaces are definitely the next face of the Web. It's just a shame that it's been so long in coming. Eternal Ecustomer does a fine job of introducting the concepts involved in creating and usine intelligent interfaces, synthetic people, and intelligent data warehouses,in a way that is very easy to digest, even by computer novices. I've used the book to help my customer "get" what internet-based service is all about. I recommend the book highly.

The web is a constantly evolving metaphor for electronic, people-less commerce. As the recent dot com bomb has illustrated, there's nothing magic about a web site. You have to treat customers like customers and provide a service. Customers don't care if you have trouble setting up a database or links between your phone lines and your ecommerce site. What they expect, they get -- or they go away, never to return. The Eternal Ecustomer does a masterful job at peeling through the layers of jargon and hype that cover the web and exposes the bare nerves of the business-customer relationship. After reading this book, you can't help but "get" why the latest downturn in web stocks was inevitable. IT also illustrates why the winners will be playing by the rules defined here.