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 Simple Truths of Service is a customer service classic that will grab your heart and not let go! More than five million people have been touched by this story. Have you? Your competitive edge in today's business environment is in how your customers are treated. If you want to succeed, then it's time to get creative about customer service! The Simple Truths of Service is an unforgettable true story about a very special young man who takes a chance and changes the culture of a grocery store. Each and every member of your team will be coming up with their own ideas of how to deliver that extra special service after they read this book. Johnny is young man living with Down Syndrome who changes the culture of a grocery store by being creative and giving the customers more than they expect. He puts his own personal signature on each and every interaction. Read about Johnny and other great customer experience stories that will have your customer service team bursting with new ways to make your company stand out from the crowd.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?'

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.

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.

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'.

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.

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.

This book puts the commoditization phenomenon under the microscope, laying out an economic analysis, followed by solutions and strategic recommendations. Using concrete examples this book will help to change businesses approach by acting not only on the economic analysis presented, but also on the diagnosis of commoditization and the recommendations for creation of customer value. The common thread throughout this approach is the obsession with customer satisfaction, the search for a fair balance between the long and short term, and the will to reinvent business models by harnessing innovation.

In "Loyalty Myths"," " the authors have assembled 53 of the most common beliefs about customer loyalty - all of them wrong or misconceived! Each of the beliefs in this book is debunked with real-world examples. While other books speak in platitudes; this book is the only one to validate each proposition with real data.

Granted unprecedented access to customer records from a variety of multi-national corporations. Through these records, Ipsos Loyalty was able to precisely track the impact of this customer-centric construct on actual purchasing behavior. The authors' findings and conclusions will stun business leaders around the world. The lessons learned from these provide a true guide for the proper use of customer loyalty.

Customer Experience is now the key differentiator as consumers and businesses alike decide among competing brands. The authors explore growing trends in Experience Psychology, Social Media and Neuroscience and their impact on Customer Experience that businesses need to understand to gain preference, loyalty and market share.

The fourth in Springer 's series on Stakeholder Management books, this volume looks back at the beginnings of Stakeholder Management and how it has developed into a fully-fledged system over the last 20 years. It also highlights the importance of a benchmarking database generated from several thousand case studies for comparing businesses. What 's more, international case studies look at the application of Stakeholder Management in a wide array of industries such as the automotive, public and hospitality sector as well as the consumer market. The reader benefits from a well-rounded account of articles that explain the entire process from data collection to the implementation of actions derived from result analysis.

Marketing Through Turbulent Times offers a range of tools, principles and approaches for decision makers who want to lead their organization toward a robust future by ensuring that their marketing strategies are not only relevant for today's difficult environment but will also lay the foundation for innovative growth opportunities.

Keep them coming back for more Brilliant Customer Service is your guide to help you deliver exceptional customer service and keep your customers coming back time and time and again. It's for anyone involved in any organisation - whether you run your own business, manage people or you are a customer facing employee. It doesn't matter what your budget is, you'll find lots of simple changes you can implement right now to build a highly successful customer service strategy. BRILLIANT OUTCOMES * Identify your customers real needs and how best to meet them * Build trust and long term loyalty with your customers to stay ahead of the competition * Make sure you are remembered and recommended

Everything equal, customers choose whether they will return based on the feeling they get when interacting with your brand. Research reveals that a high number of customers will go through the trouble of switching brands due to a bad customer experience. Great businesses know how to make a customer feel seen, understood, and valued. Those satisfied customers trust you more and come back--and they tell their friends. Backed by plenty of on-the-ground research and illustrated with real-life examples, The Come Back Culture shows you how to create an experience that keeps people coming back for more. It shows you how to - build a hospitable team - know your guest - create moments that impress - recover quickly when things go wrong - and more Whether you offer a service or a product online or at a physical location, you can use the principles in this book to turn your customers into raving fans of your business who not only spend their money but continue to spread awareness of your brand.

Praise for JUST ASK A WOMAN

"Just when you think you know it all, Mary Lou Quinlan helps you with your thinking in a new and wonderful way. If you want to capture a larger piece of your market, read this book."
–Gordon Bethune, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer
Continental Airlines, Inc.

"Mary Lou’s fascinating book delving into the commonsense insights of women toward products both mundane and high tech is a watershed event. Mary Lou shows that women are both procedural and disciplined (many even use an ‘informal board of directors’ to confirm their own opinions), and marketers who don’t take them seriously do so at their own peril."
–Rance Crain, Editor-in-Chief, Advertising Age

"A deeply insightful and actionable articulation of how women live today, their deepest feelings and hopes and desires. There’s a depth of understanding here that clearly reveals the enormous experience that Quinlan has had in marketing and advertising."
–John Pepper, Chairman, Executive Committee of the Board
Procter & Gamble

"Think you know how to make women buy your product? Think again. Mary Lou Quinlan surprises and delights with insight into what it takes to sell almost anything to any woman."
–Melanie Wells, Senior Editor, Forbes

"Mary Lou Quinlan harnesses her decades of experience to provide powerful insights into how to not only ‘ask a woman’ but also to listen to her. Highly readable, this book speaks cogently to practicing and aspiring marketers about tapping into the minds and pocketbooks of women. Quinlan provides a guide to smarter and better marketing."
–Stephen A. Greyser, Professor of Marketing and Communications Emeritus
Harvard Business School

This collection of original ethnographically based research from five continents, provides insights into the dynamics of stability and change in our globalizing world. The chapters comprising Live Experiences of Public Consumption give a vivid account of how cultural and economic value intertwine at face-to-face encounters in marketplaces.

Superior Customer Value is a state-of-the-art guide to designing, implementing and evaluating a customer value strategy in service, technology and information-based organizations. A customer-centric culture provides focus and direction for an organization, driving and enhancing market performance. By benchmarking the best companies in the world, Weinstein shows students and marketers what it really means to create exceptional value for customers in the Now Economy. Learn how to transform companies by competing via the 5-S framework - speed, service, selection, solutions and sociability. Other valuable tools such as the Customer Value Funnel, Service-Quality-Image-Price (SQIP) framework, SERVQUAL, and the Customer Value/Retention Model frame the reader's thinking on how to improve marketing operations to create customer-centered organizations. This edition features a stronger emphasis on marketing thinking, planning and strategy, as well as new material on the Now Economy, millennials, customer obsession, business models, segmentation and personalized marketing, customer experience management and customer journey mapping, value pricing, customer engagement, relationship marketing and technology, marketing metrics and customer loyalty and retention. Built on a solid research basis, this practical and action-oriented book will give students and managers an edge in improving their marketing operations to create superior customer experiences.

The ultimate guide to transforming your customer service, company culture, and customer experience, endorsed by all the top names in the field. Great customer service may be today's most essential competitive advantage. This book gives a step-by-step plan to craft a customer service culture and customer experience so powerful that they'll transform your organization and boost your company's bottom line. You'll enjoy inspirational and hilarious tales from the trenches as author Micah Solomon, one of the world's best-known customer service consultants and thought leaders, brings you with him on hands-on adventures assessing and transforming customer service in a variety of industries. In Ignore Your Customers (and They'll Go Away), you will find: Exclusive customer service secrets and proven turnaround methodologies showing you how to perform effective and lasting customer service transformation within your company. A dive into one of the hottest topics in business today: company culture, specifically how to build and sustain a customer-centric company culture. Case studies and anecdotes from the great customer-centric companies of our time. Each chapter concludes with a Business Reading Group Guide and a point-by-point summary to maximize your memory retention and make every insight actionable. Drawing on a wealth of stories assembled from today's most innovative and successful companies including Amazon, USAA, The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, Nordstrom, MOD Pizza, and more, Solomon reveals what it takes to turn an average customer interaction into one that drives customer engagement and lifelong loyalty.