This volume explores the interconnection of social, political, technological and economic challenges that impact consumer relationships, new product launches and consumer interests. Featuring contributions presented at the 2019 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) World Marketing Congress (WMC) held in Edinburgh, Scotland, the theme of this proceedings draws from the Scottish Enlightenment movement of the mid-Eighteenth Century, which centered on ideas of liberty, progress and the scientific method. The core values of this movement are being challenged by the rapidly changing, globally shifting and digitally connected world. The contributions presented in this volume reflect and reframe the roles of marketers and marketing in incorporating and advancing the ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment within contemporary marketing theory and practice. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research, and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses, and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. The series deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complementing the Academy's flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review (AMSR). Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.

Today, consumers have more choice than ever before. It's no longer enough to simply provide a service - companies who want to stay in business must also provide impeccable service with such consistency, integrity and creativity that people who experience it will not only keep coming back for more, but recommend your business to their friends, families, and colleagues. The Customer Rules is entirely focused on one ultimate goal: to help you, no matter what your position or job title, secure the most revenue-boosting asset you could wish for: a reputation for excellent service. Lee Cockerell, former Executive Vice President of Operations at Disney World - a company which has redefined what a business can do for their customers - shows you how: from why you should 'Never say no - except No Problem' to asking yourself 'What Would Mum Do?'. His 39 easy-to-follow rules apply to any industry and any company, large, small, public, private, online or High Street. The principles revealed in this book, tried and tested in one of the world's happiest environments, can give you everything you need to truly connect with your customers.

Innovation is the process of value creation through use of relevant knowledge, capabilities and resources for conversion of ideas into new products, processes and practices, and improvements in existing products, processes and practices. Innovations of various types and forms are crucial to achieving and sustaining a competitive advantage in the marketplace, the principal focus of competitive strategy.Product innovations play a central role in various strategic marketing contexts such as meeting consumers' needs and wants, responding to changes in consumers' preferences, shaping consumers' preferences, entering new markets, enhancing a firm's market position in presently served product-markets, differentiating the firm's product offerings from competitors' offerings, neutralizing the effects of competitors' actions, and preemption and deterrence of competitors. Against this backdrop, articles published in this volume focus on substantive issues in innovation, marketing strategy, and the nexus of innovation and marketing strategy. The substantive issues addressed in these articles include sources of innovation, customer involvement in innovation, innovations in a digital environment, innovations in an information rich environment, the role of market foresight and design orientation as organizational capabilities in new product development and new product performance, and the effects of market orientation, organizational culture, trust and commitment on business performance.

Customer experience engineering applied to the engineering department is rare, but needed. Most companies keep support, UX, engineering, product, and CX separate. To address this gap, this book highlights roles and techniques that are proven to accelerate issue detection and prevention by 30% or more. With the author's vast experience in tech support, he has developed techniques and skills that allow engineers to gain customer insights faster and through new and insightful sources that are within their reach. You will develop a deep understanding of the impact of issues; understand and optimize the speed of the engineering feedback loop (issue resolution time); and develop the ability to calculate the cost of the issues or customer friction to the business (in aggregate and on a case-by-case basis). Organizations can save significant money and add additional revenue by addressing customer friction proactively in collaboration with product, engineering, and site reliability engineering (SRE) functions and reduce the average time of an issue resolution by 80%. The cross-functional leadership, mentoring, and engineering techniques you'll learn from this proactive stance are very valuable and teachable, and this book will show you the path forward. What You Will Learn Gain the techniques and tools necessary to validate customer journey success in production Contribute to customer-centric key performance indicators (KPIs) on executive dashboards Create meaningful insights and data points that allowed the feedback loop to be optimized and efficient Who This Book is For Professionals participating in the value stream of digital software engineering for the benefit of customer experiences, directly or indirectly. You may be an engineer practicing DevOps or site reliability, or you might be a product owner, UX designer, or researcher. You might be working in support and seeking for new ways to engage with your engineering teams.

This pioneering book on food study pursues an interdisciplinary approach to service science and the service engineering field. Further, it highlights a range of experiments conducted at actual business sites to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies and theories. In modern society, food study has become more complex, as it involves multiple fields of science. For instance, a long-lived society entails a number of problems for human beings. A balanced intake of nutrients is important for a healthy life, but in many cases, healthy food is not the most enjoyable. As such, it is important for the food industry to provide foods that are both tasty and wholesome, based on the sciences of gastronomy and nutrition. Conventional food study proceeds along the lines of a specific field such as nutrition, agriculture, or gastronomy, though it should be conducted in an interdisciplinary manner. This book covers multifaceted research on food study to respond to today's societal demands, based mainly on the natural and social sciences. It addresses a wide range of topics, including: food production management using mathematical modeling, operations research, and production engineering; evaluation of food products based on big data analysis; psychological experiments and ethnography; food products based on consumer behavior; organoleptic assessment and health improvement; design of physical dining environments using virtual reality, pedestrian debt recognition (human indoor position measuring), and observation of behavior. Reporting on and assessing many studies conducted at actual business locations, the book offers a unique and highly practical resource.

This research monograph brings AI to the field of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to make a customer experience with a product or service smart and enjoyable. AI is here to help customers to get a refund for a canceled flight, unfreeze a banking account or get a health test result. Today, CRM has evolved from storing and analyzing customers' data to predicting and understanding their behavior by putting a CRM system in a customers' shoes. Hence advanced reasoning with learning from small data, about customers' attitudes, introspection, reading between the lines of customer communication and explainability need to come into play. Artificial Intelligence for Customer Relationship Management leverages a number of Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), simulation and reasoning techniques to enable CRM with intelligence. An effective and robust CRM needs to be able to chat with customers, providing desired information, completing their transactions and resolving their problems. It introduces a systematic means of ascertaining a customers' frame of mind, their intents and attitudes to determine when to provide a thorough answer, a recommendation, an explanation, a proper argument, timely advice and promotion or compensation. The author employs a spectrum of ML methods, from deterministic to statistical to deep, to predict customer behavior and anticipate possible complaints, assuring customer retention efficiently. Providing a forum for the exchange of ideas in AI, this book provides a concise yet comprehensive coverage of methodologies, tools, issues, applications, and future trends for professionals, managers, and researchers in the CRM field together with AI and IT professionals.

Easy to digest tips and tools on how "not" to run a business

Experts are constantly telling us what we need to be doing to improve our businesses. Hundreds of books in the market are filled with advice from these experts. But how can you filter out all of the bad advice, misinformation, and misuse of business tools that is out there? None of us needs another list of what we should be doing. "QR Codes Kill Kittens" tells you what not to do. Easy to digest, easy to avoid. The book is separated into several sections, and each will include a story related to the topic in addition to tips and explanations on what not to do.Includes real-life examples along with tips and guidance on experts, human resources, marketing/branding, networking (in person and online), public relations, and customer serviceWritten by Scott Stratten, author of "UnMarketing" and the President of UnMarketing.com, a company that combines efforts in viral, social, and authentic marketing; he has appeared on Mashable.com and CNN.com, and in the "Wall Street Journal, USA Today," and "Fast Company"

It doesn't do you any good to do a few things right and a lot of things wrong. Find out what not to do. If reading this book saves just one kitten's life, it's worth it.

This book examines the effective and appropriate integration of project customers in intercultural settings. It first presents the theoretical background and the state of the art in intercultural project stakeholder management. The book then describes the use of qualitative and quantitative (Delphi survey) methods to produce a dataset, and the development of a relational model for customer engagement in intercultural projects based on this dataset. The book can be used to inform future research in the area of international project management, while also serving as a guide for project management practitioners who need to engage culturally diverse users, sponsors and customers.

We live in extraordinary economic times - volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. In the service sector, many traditional approaches are no longer relevant and the landscape of brand identity, employee engagement and customer experience is changing. Organizations no longer own their own brand, while customers' expectations are increasing. Brands are now co- owned by all stakeholders - employees, service partners, local communities, investors and customers. This book explores the idea that a new 'values economy' is emerging. The successful organizations of tomorrow will establish a shared consensus of values between stakeholders - providing transparent communications and inclusivity. It then offers a practical enabling methodology: the SERVICEBRAND approach, combining brand identity, employee engagement and customer experience. The SERVICEBRAND approach will redefine the nature of business: one ecosystem of values-driven service for multiple stakeholders driving sustained organizational performance and authentic business success.

This book gathers a selection of refereed papers presented at the 8th International Conference on Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research 2020 (KEER 2020), which was held in Tokyo, Japan, 7-9 September 2020. The contributions address the latest advances in and innovative applications of Kansei Engineering and Emotion Research and related topics. This book caters researchers and graduate students in the field of design, art, Kansei engineering, and other engineering fields, psychology, physiology, and education.

This book presents the Recommender System for Improving Customer Loyalty. New and innovative products have begun appearing from a wide variety of countries, which has increased the need to improve the customer experience. When a customer spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on a piece of equipment, keeping it running efficiently is critical to achieving the desired return on investment. Moreover, managers have discovered that delivering a better customer experience pays off in a number of ways. A study of publicly traded companies conducted by Watermark Consulting found that from 2007 to 2013, companies with a better customer service generated a total return to shareholders that was 26 points higher than the S&P 500. This is only one of many studies that illustrate the measurable value of providing a better service experience. The Recommender System presented here addresses several important issues. (1) It provides a decision framework to help managers determine which actions are likely to have the greatest impact on the Net Promoter Score. (2) The results are based on multiple clients. The data mining techniques employed in the Recommender System allow users to "learn" from the experiences of others, without sharing proprietary information. This dramatically enhances the power of the system. (3) It supplements traditional text mining options. Text mining can be used to identify the frequency with which topics are mentioned, and the sentiment associated with a given topic. The Recommender System allows users to view specific, anonymous comments associated with actual customers. Studying these comments can provide highly accurate insights into the steps that can be taken to improve the customer experience. (4) Lastly, the system provides a sensitivity analysis feature. In some cases, certain actions can be more easily implemented than others. The Recommender System allows managers to "weigh" these actions and determine which ones would have a greater impact.

Take Care of Your Customers--or Someone Else Will

Legendary Service

Great customer service is a concept organizations love to be known for. Yet most people consider the service they receive to be average, at best. Successful companies make the connection between legendary customer service and a thriving business--they recognize that the way employees treat customers is directly related to the way managers treat employees.

Kelsey Young is an optimistic but disillusioned sales associate working her way through college. Her world opens up when one of her professors challenges her to create a culture of service at her workplace by putting the five components of Legendary Service into practice. Although Ferguson's, the store where Kelsey works, certainly isn't known for service excellence, Kelsey believes she can make a positive difference. She quickly learns that culture change isn't easy--and that her role as a frontline employee is more significant than she ever could have imagined.

In characteristic Blanchard style, "Legendary Service: The Key Is to Care" is a quick and entertaining read for people at all organizational levels in every industry. When applied, its lessons will have a profound impact on the service experience your customers will receive. Whether a CEO or a part-time employee, every person can make a difference--and customer service is everyone's job.

PRAISE FOR "LEGENDARY SERVICE"

""Read this book and establish a service culture in your organization."" -- Horst Schulze, Chairman/CEO, Capella Hotel Group

""Legendary Service has great learnings for people at all organizational levels: for executives and managers, the value of a service culture; and for frontline staff, the reality that they are the face of the company and can make a difference. Legendary service--it's everyone, always."" -- Mark King, CEO and President, TaylorMade Golf

""Everything I know about service I learned from my career at Hilton Hotels, Marriott International, The Walt Disney Company, and Ken Blanchard. The One Minute Manager dramatically changed my thinking 32 years ago. Legendary Service will teach the next generation how to deliver sensational service. Buy it, study it, implement it."" -- Lee Cockerell, Executive Vice President, Walt Disney World (Retired & Inspired), and author of "Creating Magic" and "The Customer Rules"

""Kathy Cuff and Vicki Halsey have created a fantastic customer service model called ICARE. When you add their voices to that of the master storyteller Ken Blanchard, you have a masterpiece entitled Legendary Service. It is a must-read for everyone who, like me, has a passion for service."" -- Colleen Barrett, President Emeritus, Southwest Airlines, and coauthor of "Lead with LUV"

""Ken Blanchard has done it again and delivered the right book at the right time. Legendary Service provides the essentials of hospitality and servant leadership in a way that everyone can adopt--right now--today "" -- John Caparella, President and COO, The Venetian, The Palazzo, and Sands Expo

""Ken, Kathy, and Vicki show us how to change everyday service events into memorable experiences. Their book is a must-read for anyone unwilling to accept mediocrity."" -- Leonardo Inghilleri, coauthor of "Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit"

Geoff Ramm has a passion for incredible customer service. In this book, he's hand-picked THE most original, unique and quirky examples of creative customer experiences that are guaranteed to inspire you and your team to outperform, outmanoeuvre and stand head and shoulders above the competition. This is the book that your competitors wish they had, it's your ticket to service superstardom and it's going to reveal to you: The gap in your service that you never knew existed. Smart techniques to help you generate clever experiences of your own. Simple, cost-effective ideas and touches that will mean the world to your customers. Fun, fresh and exciting new perspectives that will inject your entire team with enthusiasm. Fantastic ideas and inspiring stories that will get you spectacular results. Why not join Geoff on this highly enjoyable, eye-opening and rewarding customer service journey around the world? He'll introduce you to some of the amazing people he's met who have discovered extraordinary ways to deliver world-class experiences, and he'll show you how you can use their strategies to make your own brand unforgettable, your business unmissable and your customers coming back for more. So, are you ready to become a true Celebrity Service Superstar?Great! It's time to get started on getting people talking...about you! "Entertaining and thought-provoking! Geoff Ramm's knowledge and insight will reshape the way you think about customer service" Heather McNamee, Area General Manager, Fraser's Hospitality UK

In this trusted customer service classic, the renowned business training and consulting services practice Performance Research Associates, Inc. lays bare the truth all companies have come to accept but few know what to do with: companies that emphasize customer service make more money and keep customers longer than those that don't. For over two decades, Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service has combined this timeless wisdom with powerful tools, real-world examples, and the latest methods to provide customer service professionals an indispensable guide. With lighthearted examples and to-the-point solutions, the book provides readers with proven tips and strategies for exceeding customer needs and expectations, determining the right times to bend or break the rules, becoming fantastic fixers and powerful problem-solvers, using the RATER factors to wow your customers, understanding cultural and generational differences, and coping effectively with your most challenging customers. Plus, the revised fifth edition delivers new information on using social media for communication and service recovery, owning service encounters, responding positively to negative feedback, and more.What is quality customer service--and how do you consistently deliver it for your customers? Discover the answers in this go-to guide for helping customer service professionals deliver outstanding service that keeps customers coming back.

There is no such thing as an easy sale. However, selling to an existing customer-whether by refreshing an old product or introducing a new and different product-is often easier, faster, and returns higher margins. Centering your organization's sales strategy on your installed base is a smart and proven way to achieve long-lasting, profitable growth. Using Installed Base Selling to Maximize Revenue reveals a step-by-step, integrated approach you can begin using today. Authors Remi Gicquel and Paul-Andre Lambert show how you can apply this robust and reliable end-to-end solution by illustrating concepts though real-world case studies from Spotify, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Nestle, and more. Full of wisdom fit for the digital era, this book presents the results of the authors' experience and research into current installed base selling processes, identifying, from an objective point of view, what works and what does not. This book explains fundamental concepts such as the profitable growth paradox, the installed base profit wedge, operational methodologies for managing your installed base selling transformation, and much more. Innovative companies protect and nurture their most valuable asset-their customers and the data that defines them. They put installed base selling at the heart of their sales strategy. Now, it's your turn! What You Will Learn How to maximize the return from installed base customers Fundamental concepts such as the profitable growth paradox, the installed base profit wedge, and turnkey operational sales methodologies to best maneuver your sales teams Keys to changing patterns to become a company that can enjoy higher profitable revenues for years Who This Book Is For General Managers, Sales and Marketing Leaders who are eager to transform their business to secure long-lasting profits, and for leaders looking for a pragmatic approach to transform their sales force to harvest the potential of their existing customers.

The future of work is already here. Customers are adopting disruptive technologies faster than your company can adapt. When your customers are delighted, they can amplify your message in ways that were never before possible. But when your company's performance runs short of what you've promised, customers can seize control of your brand message, spreading their disappointment and frustration faster than you can keep up. To keep pace with today's connected customers, your company must become a connected company. That means deeply engaging with workers, partners, and customers, changing how work is done, how you measure success, and how performance is rewarded. It requires a new way of thinking about your company: less like a machine to be controlled, and more like a complex, dynamic system that can learn and adapt over time. Connected companies have the advantage, because they learn and move faster than their competitors. While others work in isolation, they link into rich networks of possibility and expand their influence. Connected companies around the world are aggressively acquiring customers and disrupting the competition. In The Connected Company, we examine what they're doing, how they're doing it, and why it works. And we show you how your company can use the same principles to adapt - and thrive - in today's ever-changing global marketplace.

Learn how to develop the values proven to boost sales performance, to ensure customers choose you over the competition in today's crowded marketplace. For years, sales people have struggled with cliched views of how they sell, while at the same time customers have become more sophisticated and discerning, stopping off at different or unconventional places in the sales funnel. The result is that the technique of sales people controlling the sales conversation and learning how to influence the customer no longer works. Selling Transformed introduces the new world of selling, and addresses the reasons why sales people are so poorly perceived. Selling Transformed provides fresh, tangible ideas on how to develop better sales practices. Focusing as much on the customers as on the sellers, it explains key theories of selling effectively and introduces four proven strategies that are based on the values customers look for in sales people: authenticity, client-centricity, proactive creativity and being tactfully audacious. Explaining what customers look for in sales people, and advising on how to develop and deliver these values, this is a new type of sales manual guaranteed to improve sales performance.

Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance -- for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up jeopardized the relationship. In Uncommon Service, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss show how, in a volatile economy where the old rules of strategic advantage no longer hold true, service must become a competitive weapon, not a damage-control function. That means weaving service tightly into every core decision your company makes. The authors reveal a transformed view of service, presenting an operating model built on tough choices organizations must make: * How do customers define "excellence" in your offering? Is it convenience? Friendliness? Flexible choices? Price? * How will you get paid for that excellence? Will you charge customers more? Get them to handle more service tasks themselves? * How will you empower your employees to deliver excellence? What will your recruiting, selection, training, and job design practices look like? What about your organizational culture? * How will you get your customers to behave? For example, what do you need to do to get them to treat your employees with respect? Do you need to make it easier for them to use new technology? Practical and engaging, Uncommon Service makes a powerful case for a new and systematic approach to service as a means of boosting productivity, profitability, and competitive advantage.

If you don't offer great customer experience, your main competitors will take away 50% of your business. Period. Gone are the days in which businesses could simply offer an "OK" experience and get away with it. In today's hypercompetitive environment, companies can no longer be just B2C or B2B. They must become B2Me - more personal, more relevant. With customers having higher expectations and access to more information than ever before, companies must create stellar, frictionless, personalized, and memorable customer experiences, if they plan to stay in the game. In this book, you will learn: * What customer experience truly is. * How emotions can increase customer loyalty...or make customers ditch a brand. * Which behaviors and attitudes lose customers. * Ten easy, practical, and proven ways to immediately improve your customer experience. * What renowned companies do to offer the best customer experience. This book is for anyone who works serving customers in a B2C company or other businesses in a B2B environment. Everyone has an important role to play in creating a good customer experience, whether it be managers, associates, sales reps, marketing professionals, web strategists, accountants, customer service reps, delivery people, or installers. No matter what role you play, this book offers easy tips, recommendations, and examples to help improve customer experience, realistically, sustainably, and affordably.

This book provides stimulating insights into the ways in which the adoption of experience logic can revitalize marketing perspectives and stimulate novel approaches to the creation and delivery of value. The first part of the book, which has a theoretical focus, reviews the international literature and offers conceptual observations on the experiential perspective. Suggestions are made on how experience logic can act as a new driver for the management of marketing processes in firms within the context of the experience economy. In the second part of the book, attention turns to the applications of experience logic in different sectors, including tourism, commerce, culture, and trade shows. Company-specific examples of benefits of the experiential approach are also explored in case studies on gift box providers, marketing of traditional local products, and the cosmetics industry. The book will be of particular interest for marketing specialists, but will additionally be of value for managers in private companies and public bodies who wish to enhance their marketing methods.

How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business

"The real value of this book is that it makes SOA and Web services, which are critical and business-transforming, crystal-clear to the layman, both business and IT leaders. The book stays focused on the real-world issues facing business and government institutions today. In an industry full of experts of many stripes, Ron and Jason are the real thing: savvy, experienced, and realistic. They have produced a must-read book for management."
--Paul Lipton, Senior Architect, Unicenter Web Services and Application Management Computer Associates

"This is by far the finest publication on SOA of our time. From cover to back, "Service Orient or Be Doomed " strips away the layers of confusion most IT stakeholders face when confronted with enterprise architecture, and illustrates pragmatic and practical paths towards a sustainable and efficient enterprise architecture. Both the technically savvy and the bean counters will enjoy this book that speaks to the critical points they need to understand."
--Duane A. Nickull Senior Standards Strategist, Adobe Systems, Inc. Chair, OASIS SOA Reference Model Technical Committee Vice chair, United Nations CEFACT (UN/CEFACT)

"If you're looking for a guide that's based on reality, this is it. These guys know how you can service-orient your enterprise and have the best chance of success. This book is the best SOA tool you can buy. I'm recommending it to everyone."
--Dave Linthicum, CEO, BRIDGEWERX

"Jason and Ron are experts on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and have written the first book that is aimed at helping a nontechnical businessperson understand why the SOA computing revolution is critical to business. Rather than provide a nerdy death via buzzword book, Jason and Ron take a humorous, clever, and insightful romp through this new technology and how it impacts business in general."
--Brad Feld, Mobius Venture Capital

Authors Jason Bloomberg and Ronald Schmelzer-senior analysts for highly respected IT advisory and analysis firm ZapThink-say it all in the title of their new book, "Service Orient or Be Doomed : How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business." That is, if you fail to service orient your company, you will fail in competing with the organizations that do.

This provocative new book takes service orientation out of its more familiar technological surroundings within service-oriented architecture and introduces it as a philosophy that advocates its rightful place within a business context, redefining it as a new way of thinking about organizing your business and its processes.

Informal, challenging, and intelligent in style, "Service Orient or Be Doomed : How Service Orientation Will Change Your Business" shows you how you can best use technology resources to meet your company's business goals and empower your company to go from "stuck" to "competitive."

This book analyzes the impact of the digital economy on customer satisfaction, shopping experience, resistance to change, script theory, and loyalty. The model introduced assumes that online markets have led to a redefinition of the concepts of loyalty and shopping scripts as a way to reduce customers' cognitive effort, by optimizing purchase time and increasing the speed and satisfaction of the shopping experience. It describes the utility function of the script by retaining customer loyalty and making the customer more reluctant to abandon his regular supplier. It also explores the difficulty faced by the higher churn rate on the Internet and the minimization of search costs, by integrating more functionality to achieve the ultimate goal of behavioral and cognitive loyalty. The authors provide an analysis in a "digital" view of the economic theory of switching costs and the resulting lock-in mechanisms which, in a classical economy, are often a barrier to disloyalty. It is a useful and effective tool for online businesses, their main managerial and strategic implications, and the adaptability to existing contexts.