A practical approach to better customer experience through service design.

Service Design For Business helps you transform your customer's experience and keep them engaged through the art of intentional service design. Written by the experts at Livework, this practical guide offers a tangible, effective approach for better responding to customers' needs and demands, and provides concrete strategy that can be implemented immediately. You'll learn how taking a design approach to problem solving helps foster creativity, and how to apply it to the real issues that move businesses forward. Highly visual and organized for easy navigation, this quick read is a handbook for connecting market factors to the organizational challenge of customer experience by seeing your company through the customers' eyes.

Livework pioneered the service design industry, and guides organizations including Sony, the British Government, Volkswagen Procter & Gamble, the BBC, and more toward a more carefully curated customer experience. In this book, the Livework experts show you how to put service design to work in your company to solve the ongoing challenge of winning with customers:

• Approach customer experience from a design perspective
• See your organization through the lens of the customer
• Make customer experience an organization-wide responsibility
• Analyze the market factors that dovetail with customer experience design

The Internet and other digital technology has brought the world to your customers' fingertips. With unprecedented choice, consumers are demanding more than just a great product—the organizations coming out on top are designing and delivering experiences tailored to their customers' wants. Service Design For Business gives you the practical insight and service design perspective you need to shape the way your customers view your organization.

Gain, engage, and retain customers with positive experiences

A positive customer experience is absolutely essential to keeping your business relevant. Today's business owners need to know how to connect and engage with their customers through a variety of different channels, including online reviews and word of mouth. "Customer Experience For Dummies "helps you listen to your customers and offers friendly, practical, and easy-to-implement solutions for incorporating customer engagement into your business plans and keep the crowds singing your praises.

The book will show you simple and attainable ways to increase customer experience and generate sales growth, competitive advantage, and profitability. You'll get the know-how to successfully optimize social media to create more loyal customers, provide feedback that keeps them coming back for more, become a trustworthy and transparent entity that receives positive reviews, and so much more.Gives you the tools you need to target customers more preciselyHelps you implement new social and mobile strategiesShows you how to generate and maintain customer loyalty in order to achieve success through multiple channelsExplains how a fully-engaged customer can help you outperform the competitionLearn how to respond effectively to customer feedback

Your brand's reputation and success is your lifeblood, and "Customer Experience For Dummies" shows you how to stay relevant, add value, and win and retain customers.

Customers are treated badly. Not all customers. Not always. But many are and often. Some customers are bad. They treat firms badly. Firms have to react. Employees and customers endure the consequences. Such bad behaviours, by firms and customers, have consequences for perceptions of trust and fairness, for endorsements and referrals, for repeat purchasing and loyalty, and ultimately for a firm's profitability and RoI. The management of customer relationships is core to the success and even survival of the firm. As The Dark Side of CRM explores, this is an area fraught with difficulties, duplicitous practice and undesirable behaviours. These need acknowledging, mitigating and controlling. This book is the first of its kind to define these dark sides, exploring also how firms and policy-makers might address such behaviours and manage them successfully. With contributions from many of the leading exponents globally of CRM and understanding customers, The Dark Side of CRM is essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners interested in managing customers, relationship marketing and CRM, as well as social media and marketing strategy.

Now, more than ever, customer experience plays a pivotal role in the success and longevity of a company. Based on rigorous scientific tools and global data, this book offers a simple but thorough guide on how to master the challenges of the market, and how to deliver superior performance through effective customer experience management.

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.

In "The Relationship Marketer", Soren Hougaard and Mogens Bjerre explain how the concept of the dyad (i.e., mutuality, or "you and me") is quickly becoming a fundamental principle in marketing. The authors suggest that understanding customer relationships, value co-creation, and customised business models in which effectiveness is evaluated on an individualised basis leads to outstanding business performance. Based on these principles the authors present a concrete and practically manageable framework for implementation. Readers will find surprising, useful, and applicable marketing models, typologies and tools, as well as guides to the systematic generation of strategic opportunities. "The Relationship Marketer" will be valuable reading for students and professionals in sales and marketing, as well as anyone seeking insights into dyadic market forces, which are moving industry beyond the outdated perspective of treating all customers equally.

Berry-AMA Book Prize FINALIST 2011! "The Right Sensory Mix" is one of the four best marketing books in 2011 according to the American Marketing Association Foundation. The Berry-AMA Book Prize is awarded annually be the Foundation (AMAF) and recognizes books whose innovative ideas have had significant impact on marketing and related fields. For additional information about the Berry-AMA Book Prize, visit Berry-AMA Book Prize. Why do some people drink black coffee and others stick to tea? Why do some people prefer competitors' products? Why do we sell less in this country? Many companies fail to acknowledge and analyze disparities observed among customers and simply put them down to culture or emotion. New neuroendocrinological research proves that consumers are rational: They just have a different biological perception of the same stimulus! Their preferences, behavior, and decisions are strongly influenced by the hundreds of millions of sensors monitoring their body and brain. People with more taste buds are for example sensitive to bitterness and are more likely to drink their coffee with sugar or milk, or to drink tea. After reading the book, managers will be able to: * Understand and predict consumers' behavior and preferences * Design the right sensory mix (color, shape, taste, smell, texture, and sound) for each product * Fine-tune their positioning and product range for every local market * Systematically increase their innovation hit rate

Physical retail isn't dead-but boring retail is! Remarkable Retail equips the savvy retailer with eight essential strategies to thrive in an increasingly volatile and uncertain future. Digital technology has profoundly altered the competitive landscape for retailers. In Remarkable Retail, industry thought leader Steve Dennis argues that in a world of nearly infinite choice, where the lines between digital and physical are increasingly blurred, even being very good is no longer good enough. To win and keep customers today, retailers must be nothing short of remarkable. In most retail categories, digital channels are often central to the consumer's journey, but that doesn't mean people aren't also shopping in stores; they're just using them differently, often browsing in one channel and buying in the other. The notion of a physical store channel and an ecommerce channel is increasingly a distinction without a difference; the customer is the channel. The future belongs to those who embrace the blur of digital and physical that represents modern retail today and work to deliver an experience that is more harmonized and more memorable, regardless of how consumers decide to shop. Packed with illuminating case studies from some of modern retail's biggest success stories-and leveraging Dennis's more than thirty years as a senior executive and strategic consultant to dozens of brands-Remarkable Retail lays out the case for going beyond a slightly better version of mediocre and forging a path to being truly remarkable. To help retailers on this transformation journey, Dennis presents eight essential strategies for visionary leaders who are prepared to reimagine their way of doing business. A remarkable retailer is digitally enabled, human-centered, harmonized, mobile, personal, connected, memorable, and radical. In an age where consumers have short attention spans, myriad options, and a digitally integrated relationship with every brand, Remarkable Retail is your indispensable guide to creating a powerful retail experience that keeps your customers coming back for more.

Bring Disney-level customer experience to your organization with insider guidance The Experience is a unique guide to mastering the art of customer service and service relationships, based on the principles employed at the renowned leader in customer experience - the Walt Disney Company. Co-Author Bruce Loeffler spent ten years at Disney World overseeing service excellence, and has partnered with Brian T. Church in this book, to show you how to bring that same level of care and value to your own organization. Based on the I. C.A.R.E. model, the five principles Impression, Connection, Attitude, Response, and Exceptionals give you a solid framework upon which to raise the level of your customer experience. You will learn how to identify your customer service issues and what level of Experience you are currently offering. You can then determine exactly what the "customer experience" should be for your company, and the changes required to make it happen. The Walt Disney Company is the most recognized name in the world for customer service. The "Disney Experience" draws customers from all around the world,. This book describes what it takes to achieve that level of Experience, and how any organization can do it with the right strategy and attention to detail. When the Experience is enhanced, the opportunity arises to convert customers to ambassadors who will share their Experience with others. * Find "the experience" and what it means to the Organization * Learn the five levels of experience, and why most companies fail at it * Identify service problems that face every company in the marketplace * Utilize the Experience Quotient and apply the I. C.A.R.E. principles * Learn how to convert customers to ambassadors who share their story with others Customers are the lifeblood of business. A great product offering isn't enough in today's marketplace, where everyone's looking for an "experience. Imagine the kind of value a Disney-level customer experience could bring to your organization. The Experience is a guide to getting there, from an insider's perspective.

CRM Systems in Industrial Companies contributes new knowledge on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the field of industrial marketing. Based on an in-depth case study, this book highlights the complexity and challenges in the development, implementation and use of CRM, revealing how truly challenging it is to extract value from CRM systems.

Companies who invest in successful Customer eXperience (CX) innovation stand out from the crowd. Markets tend to reward these companies because it is rare for firms to try something new, much less prove customer acceptance of their attempted innovations. Firms offering remarkable CX create loyal customers who happily pay more for their products and services, and then refer them to other customers for free. This book outlines innovative processes used to research, conceive and develop innovations in the CX space for both large and small companies. The challenge is not so much finding out what customers like, as it is remaining apart from the crowd of rivals and copycats. Written as a practical guide for managers with a background in line management, operations, marketing, finance or customer service, this book contains a simple framework with an extensive range of design thinking and creative problem solving tools. Starting with a validation for investing in improving your firm's CX, the book also provides a primer on competitive advantage, the most critical objective of strategic planning. Mastering the book's content creates the potential for any business manager or owner to find a hard-to-copy market advantage and drive their business' growth.

To stay competitive, firms need to build great products but they also need to lend these products to the uses and misuses of their customers and learn extensively from them. This is the first book to explore the idea that allowing customers to adapt features in online products or services to suit their needs is the key to viral growth.

How to effectively design and deliver virtual advisory services can be a mystery to many public and private organisations. This study examines the interesting phenomenon of providing virtual advisors to assist users in accomplishing their tasks in the digital world. Based on a thorough analysis of abundant typical applications in various business and government sectors, this book discusses the current status and future trends of virtual advisory services in digital environments. This book also reveals exactly what users expect from such services, and what they hate! It provides thought-provoking guidelines for best practice in the design and provision of virtual advisors on e-portals.

Customer centricity is fundamental to business growth and ongoing success. Most executives appreciate the importance of it yet don't know how to execute it or sell the processes internally. This thoroughly revised edition of Breaking Through guides readers systematically through the ten breakthrough points of implementation, to explain how to execute a transformation to customer centricity, so that a company can engage continuously with its customers, making them allies and advocates with all the rewards that it brings. With updates on digital opportunities, social media, emerging markets (including Africa), and the social as well as financial impacts of customer centricity , this book successfully blends strategy with implementation and also features a range of innovative new and traditional business examples from across the globe. Easy to read, in-depth and full of practical advice, this is the essential step-by-step guide to implementing customer centricity to endure in the long-term.

Marketing has become the dominant connecting mode of expression between business and non-business organisations and customers and consumers. However, there are some misgivings about marketing in the 21st century. This volume addresses the positive and negative elements of marketing and questions 'Is marketing a leviathan in today's societies?'

Service Systems Implementation provides the latest applications and practices aimed at improving the key performance indicators of service systems, especially those related to service quality, service productivity, regulatory compliance, and sustainable service innovation. The book presents action-oriented, application-oriented, design science-oriented (artifacts building: constructs, models, methods and instantiations) and case study-oriented research with actionable results by illustrating techniques that can be employed in large scale, real world examples. The case studies will help visualize service systems along the four key dimensions of people, information, technology and value propositions which can help enable better integration between them towards higher value propositions. The chapters, written by leading experts in the field, examine a wide range of substantive issues and implementations related to service science in various industries. These contributions also showcase the application of an array of research methods, including surveys, experiments, design science, case studies and frameworks, providing the reader with insights and guidelines to assist in building their own service systems, and thus, moving toward a more favorable service customer and provider experience. Service Systems Implementation, along with its companion text, The Science of Service Systems, is designed to present multidisciplinary and multisectoral perspectives on the nature of service systems, on research and practice in service, and on the future directions to advance service science. These two volumes compose a collection of articles from those involved in the emerging area known as service science.

A holistic approach to harnessing a company's processes to achieve true customer satisfaction

Every move that a corporation makes is a mixture of input, action, and output-in short, a process. To keep customers, employees, and shareholders happy, corporate management must juggle conflicting priorities. These competing priorities result in conflicting processes. To help achieve true customer satisfaction, manage-ment needs tools that allow for a holistic approach to analyzing these processes. This book provides that tool. It shows corporations how to analyze and enhance their critical processes in order to deliver the highest level of service to their internal and external customers. Providing a clear understanding of what process mapping can do for a company as well as practical applications for each step in process mapping, this useful guide outlines a proven method for assuring better processes and building a more customer-focused company.

Understand the impact of a global ageing population on how products are bought, and the effect this has on how to market and advertise these products and services to the older generation of consumers. Contains models for companies to evaluate the success of their own strategies, with tools for improving their age-friendly marketing campaigns.

The internet has changed the way consumers interact with companies. Businesses must maintain good levels of customer service in a digital world where old strategies may no longer suffice. This book explores what the successful compliance-centred businesses are doing to manage and improve customer experience.

Explains how all institutions have to turn their relationship with stakeholders into a 'social' one, which involves designing new Trust and Engagement strategies. A specific indication on how to build and measure value out of these strategies is offered by the innovative 'Value for Engagement Model'.

In their efforts to become more customer-focused, companies everywhere find themselves entangled in outmoded systems, metrics, and strategies rooted in their product-centered view of the world. Now, to ease this shift to a customer focus, marketing strategy experts Roland T. Rust, Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Katherine N. Lemon have created a dynamic new model they call "Customer Equity," a strategic framework designed to maximize every firm's most important asset, the total lifetime value of its customer base.

The authors' Customer Equity Framework yields powerful insights that will help any business increase the value of its customer base. Rust, Zeithaml, and Lemon introduce the three drivers of customer equity -- Value Equity, Brand Equity, and Retention Equity -- and explain in clear, nontechnical language how managers can base their strategies on one or a combination of these drivers. The authors demonstrate in this breakthrough book how managers can build and employ competitive metrics that reveal their company's Customer Equity relative to their competitors. Based on these metrics, they show how managers can determine which drivers are most important in their industry, how they can make efficient strategic trade-offs between expenditures on these drivers, and how to project a financial return from these expenditures. The final section devotes two chapters to the Customer Pyramid, an approach that segments customers based on their long-term profitability, and an especially important chapter examines the Internet as the ultimate Customer Equity tool. Here the authors show how companies such as Intuit.com, Schwab.com, and Priceline.com have used more than one or all three drivers to increase Customer Equity.

In this age of one-to-one marketing, understanding how to drive Customer Equity is central to the success of any firm. In particular, Driving Customer Equity will be essential reading for any marketing manager and, for that matter, any manager concerned with growing the value of the firm's customer base.

Dennis Herhausen examines how managers can successfully probe latent needs and uncover future needs of customers, labeled as proactive customer orientation. Overall, a systematic change process is developed to guide managers that aim to increase their company's proactive customer orientation.

You've read about Customer Loyalty in the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, Entrepreneur, Industry Week, Marketing News, Boardroom Reports, Marketing Management, Library Journal, The Selling Advantage, Ideas Magazine, Executive Briefings, Training, Hospitality Upgrade, Direct, Quality Digest, Marketing Tools, Houseware Executive, Journal of Pharmaceutical Management, Discount Merchandiser, TeleProfessional, NationsBank Business, Modern Jeweler, Furniture Today— now read the new and revised edition of the ground-breaking book that created all the buzz.

A revolution is taking place in the way companies organize and manage the "front-end" of their organization, where it meets its customers.
Traditional concepts of sales management, account management, and customer service are being overtaken by initiatives like customer business development, the strategic sales organization, and strategic customer management. This book aims to provide insights into how this revolution is unfolding and to provide a framework for executives and management students to address the issues involved. The book focuses on the transformation of the traditional sales organization into a strategic force leading the strategic customer management process in companies.
Traditionally, the area of sales management has mainly been treated as a tactical, operational topic in the conventional marketing literature--simply part of the communications mix within the planned marketing programme. However, the emergence of major customers as dominant buyers in many sectors as a result of pressures towards consolidation and enhanced scale of operations, is changing the way in which sales issues are addressed in supplier organizations. The growth of new forms of buyer-seller relationship based on collaboration and partnering has encouraged organizations to reconsider the sales and account management operation as an important source of competitive differentiation in commoditized markets. Increasingly, sales is being perceived as a central part of business strategy and attention given to the challenges in better aligning sales processes with strategy. This has many implications for the design of the sales organization and its management strategy, which go far beyond the confines of conventional marketing views.