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.

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.

Customer relationship management, or CRM, is certainly a hot topic in business today. If you have a small or medium-sized business, chances are you're already aware of all it can do for you. But with so many options and so much to think about, how do you get a CRM system in place with a minimum of hassle? Well, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 For Dummies is a great place to start! Written by veteran CRM experts Joel Scott and David Lee, this friendly guide will have you understanding and using Microsoft's CRM solution in a jiffy. Whether you're considering a CRM system for the first time or you've decided to switch from another system to Microsoft Dynamics CRM, this book will make it easy to: Maintain and manage all your customer information Personalize Microsoft CRM to work for your business Set up CRM to support sales, marketing, and customer service Use the Outlook client Manage territories and business units Create and manage activities Generate quotes and invoices Implement and manage a marketing campaign Work with contracts, and much more Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 For Dummies is packed with information on the latest version, It will help you get a unified view of your customer information and interactions through integrated sales, marketing, and customer service features. And that, as every business owner knows, is important to improving your bottom line!

Companies are being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. At the same time, cost management remains of paramount importance due to the competitive pressure in global markets. Thus, making enterprises more customer centric efficiently is a top management priority in most industries. Mass customization and personalization are key strategies to meet this challenge. Companies like Procter&Gamble, Lego, Nike, Adidas, Land's End, BMW, or Levi Strauss, among others, have started large-scale mass customization programs. This book provides insight into the different aspects of building a customer centric enterprise. Following an interdisciplinary approach, leading scientists and practitioners share their findings, concepts, and strategies from the perspective of design, production engineering, logistics, technology and innovation management, customer behavior, as well as marketing.

Develop standard-setting customer service!
Based on the best-selling book Fabled Service by Betsy Sanders!
This program will help you develop exceptional customer service that puts your organization above your competition. Inspiring Fabled Service helps you assess your needs and select activities to improve weak areas in your current customer service.
Teach others vital customer service skills, such as how to:
* Positively represent the organization
* Satisfy customers so they will buy the product or service
* Encourage customers to return
* Understand what motivates people and initiates action
* Solve problems immediately and effectively... and more!
Simply written, this program includes all necessary materials to create results-oriented, customized customer service training. A Trainer's Guide includes specific direction for administering the Customer Service Survey, which assesses individual strengths and weaknesses in three learning areas: understanding him or herself and others; planning for results; and product/service knowledge. The Guide also includes 12 prepared activities that correspond with the three learning areas. Using results from the survey, you choose activities that will help your group improve in its weaker areas. Each activity specifies goals, materials needed, time required, physical setting, and process (including questions to help you review what was learned and help people understand what can be applied to every day situations).
You will need to order a Participant Workbook for each person involved in the training. The Workbook includes a copy of the survey and participant materials for each activity.
Creategreat service that gets customers talking!

Mass Customization leads the strategy of today`s well succeeded companies. It indulges the customer with the so long yearned for product and/or service that exactly fits his desires and specifications. This book compiles a hand-selected variety of testimonies from Mass Customization experts worldwide with different experiences both on an academic research basis as well as on practical case studies. This diversity makes it a compulsory guide to use in any enterprise throughout the world that wants to take its business into new and more ambitious dimensions. Furthermore, its contents are structured in a way that will help everyone that wants to learn, teach or put into practice the concepts of Mass Customization.

This is an updated edition of the bestselling book by Colin Shaw and John Ivens about building and delivering great customer experiences. Many companies neglect the customer experience. The authors show that physical execution and emotional impact of customer experiences may ultimately determine customer satisfaction and loyalty and commercial success of companies and brands. With the use of compelling examples and cases the authors show that this is key for all companies and organizations. In this revised edition they show that the customer experience has now become central to the agenda for many companies and organizations. Senior Executives in a range of functions including Marketing, Strategy, Sales, Operations, Customer Services, Corporate Communications, Brand Management, Human Resource Management, etc; All Management staff with a customer facing role; Management Consultants; Supplementary reading on a range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, including MBA, especially programmes in Marketing, Strategy, Sales, Corporate Communications, Brand Management, etc; Lecturers, Researchers and Libraries in Universities, Business and Management Schools, especially in Marketing,

This book is designed to provide the underpinning knowledge and understanding required for any competency-based management course. This is a third edition of Meeting Customer Needs, a diploma level book in the Chartered Management of Institute series. This particular title meets the specific requirements of those taking the Unit DM45 entitled Customer Focus, Marketing and Planning. A new website available for use with the text to provide revision notes and lecturers notes. This book is ideal for managers seeking to establish or improve customer service and customer focus standards. It includes action plans, sample communications and checklists for managers to adapt for their own purposes. Real examples and new case studies are used throughout to illustrate points in a practical context. * Tools and technology have improved dramatically since the last edition and this book brings the reader up-to-date * Expectations and the knowledge of customers has also changed since the last edition and the new edition shows how to accommodate this * Competition has improved and standards are higher and this new edition illustrates how to meet this challenge and how to meet customers demands.

This interface is being recognized by business organizations as a key priority for management, and both practitioners and academics alike have placed a greater emphasis on the need to view the supply chain as a whole as the vehicle by which competitive advantage is achieved. As well as drawing upon current research and the experience of firms worldwide, Marketing Logistics uses numerous 'mini-cases' and vignettes to illustrate the key messages in each chapter and bring the theory to life.This book is an invaluable resource for managers who seek to understand more about the way in which the supply chain should be managed to improve their organization's competitive position, as well as students undertaking degree-level courses in marketing, logistics and supply chain management.

Are you overworked, unappreciated and under-resourced? This book understands you, and provides years and years of User Support experience packed into one volume. The 'How To' book that every IT department needs, it will help turn your helpdesk into a company asset. How to be successful at probably the most stressful job in IT

This book offers tools for measuring productivity and features ten key steps for successful support, while User Support successes and failures are revealed in true life case studies.

This book gives you techniques for:

*Justifying staff and other expenditure

* Gaining senior management support

* Getting the users on your side

* Running a motivated and productive team

* Designing and managing services and service levels

The second edition of this popular book brings updates to several of the author's ideas, strategies and techniques with new material on:

* Customer Relationship Management - definition and the role of the helpdesk

* E-Support and the Internet

* Contrasting the Call Center and the Helpdesk

* first, second and third line support

* Operational Level Agreements

* Strategies for backlog management

* Telephone technologies in user support

In addition there is:

* A new Template for a Service Level Agreement

* An Improved cost justification model for the Internal Helpdesk

* A New cost justification model for the External Helpdesk

Table of Contents

What is 'support'? - Defining Computer User Support; Support as an IT function; Forms of support; Typical support structures; Support functions; Client Management - What is a 'customer'?; What do they want?; Prioritizing clients; Keeping in contact; Customer service in IT support; A view from above; Marketing the Support Department; Service Management - Analysing service needs; Putting services in place; Excellence in support service; Service level agreements; Support from outside; The international dimension; Workload Management - Reactivity and proactivity; Managing the queue; Delegation and escalation; Measurement and reporting; Controlling the workflow; Resources Management - Justifying user support expenditure; Knowledge; Equipment; Staff Management - The ideal support person; Motivation and productivity; Staffing and structure; User support management considerations; Bibliography; Index.

Offering a pragmatic understanding of customer engagement as an object of effective marketing management, this book takes an integrative approach and brings together different streams of marketing research, such as customer activism and value formation. The author explores the notion of customer engagement by analysing empirical data compiled from firms operating in the consumer goods and services sectors, as well as from the consumers themselves. An insightful read for scholars of consumer behaviour and customer relationship management, this book advances understanding of the drivers, components and effects (both positive and negative) of customer engagement and proposes a comprehensive framework for its management.

Strong customer-focused companies have a clear, relevant promise which they obsessively deliver day-in, day-out. At the same time, they relentlessly drive the market by evolving the offer in the face of market developments and opportunities. Because they meet customer needs better than the competition, again and again, they are able to generate sustainable, profitable, market-leading organic growth. The problem the book addresses is how to achieve this. The authors identify five key steps using their framework for success: Offer a clear, relevant "customer promise"Build "customer trust" by reliably delivering that promise"Continuously improve" the promise, while still reliably delivering itDrive the market by "innovating" beyond the familiarSupport all this with an "open organization" that promotes frank discussion based on clear facts and market feedback.

Above all the book runs counter to the fashionable claim that the starting-point for business success should be to find a 'blue-sky', 'out-of-the-box' breakthrough innovation. Barwise and Meehan use many compelling cases to illustrate how managers can find ways within their existing network and organization to achieve long term growth.

This book provides the focus for an organisation's Total Quality Management process; the achievement of world-class' customer satisfaction. The book draws exclusively from actual case studies of world leading companies.

New competition, technology and economics have changed the behaviour of markets and the practice of marketing. Customers are more discerning, and demand more quality, service and choice. Established brands are under threat. New brands are tougher than ever to build. How to create business value by sustaining existing brands and building new brands is the priority of our major business leaders, the managers to whom they entrust their brands and the students who are the brand stewards of the future. In this book Stewart Pearson explains how to build your brands directly: by investing in the loyalty of your customers and explains the commercial realities behind today's marketing headlines.

This new book focusses upon customer care in relation to Human Resource Management issues and strategic planning. It addresses the objective of customer loyalty and retention in relation to business success and shows how this can integrate a company's strategy with regard to Marketing, Human Resource Management, Quality and Management of Change. This is an innovative book in a topical area that draws upon case study material.

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.