Learn about new strategies to improve service, quality, and profitability for quick service restaurants Quick Service Restaurants, Franchising, and Multi-Unit Chain Management examines a variety of issues pertaining to quick service restaurants. Quick-service restaurants (QSR) are the dominant sector of the foodservice industry and a one-hundred-billion-dollar industry. Since their inception in the 1920s, quick-service restaurants have become one of the cultural icons of America. This informative book contains vital information on: growth, change and strategy in the international foodservice industry food safety as an international problem and the formation of outreach committees to combat the challenges faced globally food consumption patterns and the driving forces that influence consumer food preferences the differences between mature and younger customers' expectations and experiences in QSRs, casual, and fine dining restaurants consumer attitudes toward airline food adding quick-service meals to airplane menus factors influencing parental patronage of QSRs a case study on how Billy Ingram, founder of White Castle restaurants, made the hamburger a staple on American menus

Driven by rapidly changing business environments and increasingly demanding consumers, many organizations are searching for new ways to achieve and retain a competitive advantage via customer intimacy and CRM. In this context, new strategic frameworks and cooperation with everybody along the whole value chain are needed to allow managers to deal with the changes in shopping patterns of consumers. This book presents a new strategic framework that has been tested successfully with various global companies. New management concepts such as Collaborative Forecasting and Replenishment, CRM, Category Management, and Mass Customization are integrated into one holistic approach with a view to jointly develop customer bonding and loyalty. Experts from companies like McKinsey, Procter&Gamble, Accenture, and AC Nielsen, as well as authors from renowned academic institutions, offer valuable insights on how to redesign organizations for the future.

For marketers, the internet is increasing in importance. One important marketing issue is how to initiate, develop, and manage relationships with customers through the internet. This holds true for marketing of goods and services, in domestic as well as international markets. This book aims to improve our knowledge on utilization of the internet in marketing. The book will supply theoretical as well empirical knowledge on managing customer relationships on the Internet. This book also contributes to the development of theory to explain the internationalization process of internet firms by proposing that models that emphasize knowledge and network are suitable for this purpose. In doing so, the book answers questions such as:

What types of business relationships are possible to establish and develop on the Internet?
How much face-to-face contact do we need in business relationships?
What are the key driving mechanisms in Internet-based relationship development?

It is a true international comparative management book, including data from Sweden, Denmark, Italy, and Finland. The book contains 14 chapters. The evidences supplied in the book are based on research in industries such as health care, bio-technology, information technology, and the air-lines. The contributors to this book are active researchers in the field of internet and marketing. The material supplied in this book is new and original.
*This series: Provides an international perspective to the study of business, with a special emphasis on management and marketing issues
*Deals with such topics as globalization, international business negotiations, cross-cultural communication, entry strategies, doingbusiness in different regions, and future trends
*Also focuses on the development of international business theory, methodological issues, the results of empirical studies and the findings of practitioners

Practical Customer Success Management is a complete "handbook for CSMs", written by a customer success expert who has coached and trained many hundreds of customer success managers across the globe. The book is aimed at increasing both productivity and consistency of quality of output for customer success managers of all levels, from relative newcomers through to seasoned professionals. The book is highly practical in nature and is packed full of good humored but very direct advice and assistance for dealing with exactly the types of real world situations CSMs face every day. Practical Customer Success Management provides a simple-to-follow, best practice framework that explains what the core customer success management steps are at each stage of the customer journey to business outcome success and in what circumstances to apply those steps. It describes and explains which situations each step applies to and provides recommendations for activities or tasks that the CSM can perform to complete each step, together with detailed explanations and step-by-step guidance for successfully completing each activity or task. Included in this book is an entire suite of tools and templates that enable rapid completion of each task and ensure consistency of approach both across multiple customer engagements and by multiple CSMs within a team. Each tool's use is clearly explained within the book, and CSMs are able to adapt and customize the tools to suit their own specific needs as they see fit.

This revised edition of Robert Jolles's classic book on sales technique features brand new material throughout, including illustrations, teaching aids, coaching techniques, and true implementation strategies
"
When you have a process, you have a way of measuring what you are doing. When you can measure it--you can fix it "
Customer Centered Selling "teaches the secrets of the world-famous Xerox sales training by reversing the conventional selling practices of searching for customer needs, pitching product, and adopting an order-taking mentality. Jolles provides a systematic, repeatable, predictable approach that teaches how to anticipate and influence behavior by studying and understanding the client's "Decision Cycle" and critical "Decision Points." Through the use of case studies, interactive activities, and job aids, anyone--from a seasoned sales professional to a manager or parent--can not only learn the power to influence behavior, but can implement these ideas as well. Put to good use by Toyota, Disney, NASA, Nortel, General Electric, a dozen universities, and more than fifty financial institutions, "Customer Centered Selling "provides a step-by-step, consultative process that inspires as it teaches.

This book presents a new and practical segmentation approach to be used in global customer management in the form of a scale by which to measure the level of corporate globalization. This is a tool that will help companies segment their customers and enable them to adapt customer management strategies when dealing with increasingly global customers. This in turn helps determine the company's own strategic position, thereby enhancing corporate performance. MARKET 1: Academics, Researchers, Libraries and post-graduate students interested in customer management and strategy MARKET 2: Practitioners interested in customer management and strategy

This fully updated second edition of Understanding Customers is a recommended textbook for the Understanding Customers Certificate CIM paper. It is divided into six parts covering the social sciences, people as individuals, people in groups, people in society and people in organisations. Each chapter of Understanding Customers consists of: * learning objectives and definitions * the theoretical background * exercises * issues to consider * current examples * implications for marketing * recent examination questions. Chris Rice isSenior Lecturer in the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University. He is a CIM examiner on the Understanding Customers paper and has widespread consultancy experience in both the private and public sector.

The food and beverage aspect of hotel operations is often the most difficult area to control effectively, but it plays a crucial role in customer satisfaction. Improving Food and Beverage Performance is able to show how successful catering operations can increase profitability whilst providing continuing improvements in quality, value and service. Keith Waller looks at the practical issues of improving performance combining the key themes of quality customer service and efficient management. This text will enable managers and students alike to recognise all the contributing factors to a successful food and beverage operation.Keith Waller is Senior Lecturer for the Faculty of Business and Management at Blackpool and the Fylde College. He has extensive experience in the hospitality industry and is a member of the Hotel and Catering International Management Association. He is the co-author, with Professor John Fuller, of The Menu, Food and Profit.

A comprehensive guide to a burgeoning field, this book shows how to design and implement a future-proof post-sales service program focused on proactively addressing customers' needs in a personalized way. For too long, companies have detached from customers after the moment of purchase and done post-sales service in a way that is reactive, generic, and not scalable. Empowered by the boom in data availability and analytics, future-ready companies will offer their customers proactive personalized post-sales service and reap tangible benefits, including higher customer satisfaction and retention and less negative word of mouth - leading to increased sales and customer lifetime value. As the stories in this book demonstrate, companies like Amazon, Adobe, Garmin, and Liberty Global are leading the way, but companies do not have to be global giants to capitalize on the techniques presented in this guide. To excel at customer experience (CX) management, companies need to implement the best customer feedback and data collection and management practices, develop state-of-the-art analytical models, and have the willingness to act. This book's strong vision and actionable roadmap, illustrated with real-life success stories, make this a compelling read for CX and customer analytics leaders, practitioners, and students alike.

In the context of rapid ICT development, this book focuses on how gamification affects consumer engagement and can be used to create a shared value for customers and companies. Based on the constructs of shared value, consumer engagement and gamification, it creates a conceptual model and a research methodology to enable empirical testing and provide complex empirical research findings. The book demonstrates the use of game elements and the motivation to play games as a means of achieving a psychological effect, i.e., consumer engagement manifested through gamified activities and brand engagement. This joint empirical study, by an expert team, concludes that the analysis of consumer perceived value in the context of engagement in gamified activities should distinguish between not just the theoretically identified company/brand-related economic, emotional, functional and social values, but also between engagement-related social and functional values.

Use this bestselling and practical guide to steer you through how to create exceptional customer experience for the modern B2B consumer. This new edition explores key topics such as AI, the role of IT in customer experience and customer relationship management. B2B Customer Experience shows readers how to deliver the very best customer experience within the business-to-business industry. Intensely practical in its approach, it is divided into five parts to walk readers through the journey of planning, mapping, structuring, implementing and controlling an effective customer experience, all bespoke for the B2B environment. Now newly revised, this new edition will provide new case studies demonstrating what makes for good or bad customer experience as well as providing new tactics and strategies that will help build an effective customer experience plan. This new edition also aims to guide the reader on how to successfully incorporate AI into their strategy whilst still delivering great customer experience. Discussing some of the best-known examples of consumer-focused customer experiences from companies such as Zappos, Nordstrom and John Lewis, B2B Customer Experience is the must-have text for any marketing professional working within a B2B environment.

This book provides retail managers with a practical guide to using data. It covers three topics that are key areas of innovation for retailers: Algorithmic Marketing, Logistics, and Pricing. Use cases from these areas are presented and discussed in a conceptual and comprehensive manner. Retail managers will learn how data analysis can be used to optimize pricing, customer loyalty and logistics without complex algorithms. The goal of the book is to help managers ask the right questions during a project, which will put them on the path to making the right decisions. It is thus aimed at practitioners who want to use advanced techniques to optimize their retail organization.

Much in the same vein as DELIVERING HAPPINESS, LOOPTAIL combines both Bruce Poon Tip's extraordinary first-person account of his entrepreneurial instincts to start and develop G Adventures, a highly-successful international travel adventure company, and along the way, he reveals his unusual management secrets that not only keep his employees fully engaged but also keep his customers extremely happy.

Advances in Hospitality and Leisure (AHL), a peer-reviewed research journal, has been published annually since 2004. AHL is indexed in Scopus and included in the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) journal quality list. Its editors, editorial board members, ad-hoc reviewers entail scholars from North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. AHL with international in focus attempts to divulge the innovative methods of inquiry to inspire new research topics that are vital and have been largely neglected in the context of hospitality, tourism, and leisure. It strives to address the needs of the populace willing to disseminate seminal ideas, concepts, and theories derived from scholarly inquiries. AHL covers full papers and research notes in the matter of conceptual models and empirical investigations using inductive and deductive methods. The authors of this publication come from America, Europe, Asia, Pacific, and Africa. Potential readers may retrieve useful articles to outline new research agendas, suggest viable topics for a dissertation work, and augment the knowledge of the new subjects of learning.

Whether it's the interminable hold times, the multitude of buttons to press, or the automated voices before reaching someone with a measurable pulse--who hasn't felt exasperated at the abuse, neglect, and wasted time when all we want is help, and maybe a little human kindness? "Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us" is journalist Emily Yellin's highly entertaining and far-reaching exploration of the multibillion-dollar customer service industry and its surprising inner-workings. Since customer service has a role in just about every industry on earth, Yellin travels the country and the world, meeting a wide range of customer service reps, corporate decision makers, industry watchers, and Internet-based consumer activists. She shows the myriad forces that converge to create these aggravating experiences and the people inside and outside the globalized corporate world crusading to make customer service better for us all. Because of the fast-moving nature of the industry, the paperback will be revised and updated throughout, including a fresh Introduction.
For the first time, Yellin gets at the heart of the human stories behind the often inhuman face of call-center customer ?service--and why customer service doesn't have to be this bad.

COVID-19 forced a dramatic change to customer behavior that resulted in an economic crisis not witnessed by anyone alive. Businesses can no longer operate as before because their customers are no longer operating as before. This book provides customer-centric based guidance for how businesses should adapt to this new reality, deriving insights from academic research, case studies, interviews, and best practice examples from around the world. As validated by hundreds of top-level executives, its readers will gain a better understanding of why customer behavior has changed so they can use the book's solutions to navigate through and succeed in the post COVID-19 future.

The Seven Myths of Customer Management is required reading for everyone who's job interacts with or impacts customers. Written in a lively, readable and anecdotal style, this book challenges much conventional wisdom and provides a powerful antidote to many potentially dangerous and expensive misconceptions. Written by two experienced and expert practitioners, it offers practical and pragmatic advice on how to unlock customer value and maximise corporate revenues.

'I wish I had had this book in front of me as the Marketing & IT snake-oil men tried to sell me their wares. This is the best exposition I have so far seen on creating focused customer strategies around what really counts and what will ultimately drive the bottom-line. Without ever losing sight of the importance of customers and meeting their needs, it introduces a realistic management-based approach and kills some sacred cows along the way.' Michael Pinder Managing Director, Premier Banking , Barclays Private Clients

'Before launching Switch I was employed in the strategic planning department of a major UK bank concentrating on the personal sector market - I only wish that back in the mid-eighties I had access to this book and the fund of knowledge it contains! A very readable and understandable book, down to earth with many appropriate real life examples - a good and compelling read.' Timothy M Green CEO of Switch Card Services (1991 - 2002)

'We shouldn't be surprised that Paul Hawkes and John Abram have penned a very surprising book. Exploding the myths of customer leadership is the dose of realism we should expect from two people who have always had their feet firmly on the ground. As leaders of one of the most successful marketing organisations of the past 20 years, they are renowned for their radical common sense. In this book, they tear sloppy arguments and widely held mantras to shreds. In their place they present a cogent, integrated framework for maximising the value of your organisation by maximising the value of your customers. Read it before you get your cheque book out; you'll use a lot less ink if you do.' Peter Simpson Commercial Director, First Direct

'Businesses thrive on creating and serving customers. In The Seven Myths of Customer Management, Paul Hawkes and John Abram show managers how to do so successfully and for long-term profits. The book is full of practical and workable advice on how to approach your markets and manage your customers.' Peter Lake Managing Director, Sweet & Maxwell Group

'An enjoyable book that provides lots of practical advice in a straightforward entertaining way. And, it tells the truth about the excesses of the 'CRM industry'.' Catherine McGrath Director Direct to Customer, Prudential Assurance

'Paul Hawkes and John Abram built an unrivalled reputation through their enormously successful consultancy practice for no-nonsense, hugely practical and extremely commercial solutions for every marketing issue imaginable across most industry sectors. An obvious next step was to produce a book that leverages the unique asset they have built over those years, a genuine insight into how to really deliver customer strategies to drive maximum value for shareholders. This is not a book for the office cabinet, it is the best 'policy and procedures manual' I have read relating to the hugely talked about but equally hugely misunderstood subject of CRM. Keep it handy - you'll need it!!' Simon Waugh Group Director of Marketing, Centrica Plc

Making Customer Satisfaction Happen provides a customer focus for your company's Total Quality process. Drawing on actual case studies of 'world-class' customer satisfaction organizations, Rod McNealy clearly illustrates the power of customer satisfaction as a strategic weapon for any business. Significantly, this book provides both an easily understandable and implementable approach to meeting and exceeding your customers' needs and expectations. Making Customer Satisfaction Happen is targeted at a broad audience of managers in any type of organization - large or small, public or private, operating for profit or non-profit. This is a 'hands-on', action-oriented, instructive guide to achieving customer satisfaction. It offers a proven approach for meeting and exceeding customers' needs and expectations to the point of 'delighting' them.

This book focuses on the implications of digitalisation in the mobility service industry. Based on an analysis of more than 450 survey responses, it explores and assesses mobility in the age of digitalisation. The content covers both changes in the relationship between the company and its customers and a potential paradigm shift among leading companies. The findings suggest that a shift from traditional mobility management to a more customer-centred management perspective is both widely accepted and increasingly necessary. Nevertheless, the inclusion of services that are not primarily concerned with overcoming spatial distances is considered to be less attractive. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to researchers and professionals who are involved in digitalisation in the mobility service industry.

As a leader in your organization, you will be very familiar with your organization's key financial statements and monthly management reports. You may have spent countless hours discussing budgets and expenditures. But how much time have you spent reflecting on the fact that these revenues are generated by actual customers-the people who pull out their wallets and pay for your products and services? In The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity, experts Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross start you on the path toward really getting to understand your customers' buying behavior as well as the health of your overall customer base. A customer-base audit is a systematic review of the buying behavior of a firm's customers using data captured by its transaction systems. It will help you answer questions such as: -- How healthy is your customer base? How realistic are your growth objectives? -- How do your customers differ in terms of their behavior and value? -- How has the quality of your customers changed over time? -- What changes in customer behavior lie behind period-to-period changes in firm performance? -- What is important to your high-value customers? Which products help you acquire and retain your best customers? Fader, Hardie, and Ross present five "lenses" through which an executive can address questions like those above. The answers are often lurking in various parts of the organization, but it is rare to find all the relevant analyses in one place, let alone performed on a regular basis (as an audit should be). Yet without such a basic, systematic understanding of the foundations of the firm's primary source of cash flow, how can executives make informed decisions? Fader, a Wharton professor, is the author of Customer Centricity and coauthor of The Customer Centricity Playbook, both of which have helped businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. In this first step of the journey, Fader, Hardie, and Ross assist leaders in gaining a fundamental understanding of their customers' buying behavior-and thus their company as a whole.

Despite businesses often being based on creating desirable experiences, products and services for consumers, many fail to consider the end user in their planning and development processes. This book is here to change that. User experience research, also known as UX research, focuses on understanding user behaviours, needs and motivations through a range of observational techniques, task analysis and other methodologies. User Research is a practical guide that shows readers how to use the vast array of user research methods available. Written by one of the UK's leading UX research professionals, readers can benefit from in-depth knowledge that explores the fundamentals of user research. Covering all the key research methods including face-to-face user testing, card sorting, surveys, A/B testing and many more, the book gives expert insight into the nuances, advantages and disadvantages of each, while also providing guidance on how to interpret, analyze and share the data once it has been obtained. Now in its second edition, User Research provides a new chapter on research operations and infrastructure as well as new material on combining user research methodologies.