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
New topics include:
- Lines of support
- The rise of the call center
- Knowledge bases
- The Intranet
- The Internet
- The external helpdesk
- Backlog management
- Industry standards
- Calculating headcountReflects technologicaladvancements in software and the Internet
Covers new ways of working: teleworking; virtual offices; keeping staff and customers connected through corporate networks from remote locations.

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.

Every business on the planet is trying to maximize the value created by its customers Learn how to do it, step by step, in this newly revised Fourth Edition of Managing Customer Experience and Relationships: A Strategic Framework. Written by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., recognized for decades as two of the world's leading experts on customer experience issues, the book combines theory, case studies, and strategic analyses to guide a company on its own quest to position its customers at the very center of its business model, and to "treat different customers differently." This latest edition adds new material including: How to manage the mass-customization principles that drive digital interactions How to understand and manage data-driven marketing analytics issues, without having to do the math How to implement and monitor customer success management, the new discipline that has arisen alongside software-as-a-service businesses How to deal with the increasing threat to privacy, autonomy, and competition posed by the big tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, and Google Teaching slide decks to accompany the book, author-written test banks for all chapters, a complete glossary for the field, and full indexing Ideal not just for students, but for managers, executives, and other business leaders, Managing Customer Experience and Relationships should prove an indispensable resource for marketing, sales, or customer service professionals in both the B2C and B2B world.

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.

Customer survey studies deals with customers, consumers and user satisfaction from a product or service. In practice, many of the customer surveys conducted by business and industry are analyzed in a very simple way, without using models or statistical methods. Typical reports include descriptive statistics and basic graphical displays. As demonstrated in this book, integrating such basic analysis with more advanced tools, provides insights on non-obvious patterns and important relationships between the survey variables. This knowledge can significantly affect the conclusions derived from a survey.

Key features: Provides an integrated, case-studies based approach to analysing customer survey data.Presents a general introduction to customer surveys, within an organization's business cycle.Contains classical techniques with modern and non standard tools.Focuses on probabilistic techniques from the area of statistics/data analysis and covers all major recent developments.Accompanied by a supporting website containing datasets and R scripts.

Customer survey specialists, quality managers and market researchers will benefit from this book as well as specialists in marketing, data mining and business intelligence fields.

WINNER: CMI Management Book of the Year Awards 2015 - Innovation and Entrepreneurship Category (1st edition) Many organizations approach customer-centic marketing and innovating their business strategy in isolation to one another, missing groundbreaking opportunities for advancement. Customer Innovation, second edition, turns this on its head by starting with the customer, innovating around their needs, then building a customer led business strategy around it. It presents a well-constructed three-by-three formula of connect, convert, collaborate, laying the foundations for innovation and change, to improve the current customer journey and expand into new customer horizons. This enables new product and service development to flow with outstanding efficiency and substantial growth. Customer Innovation, second edition, includes exciting updates around co-creation and the benefits of involving customers, stakeholders and employees from the beginning. It provides guidance on using technology to reinvent traditional business models, with consumer needs at the heart. With a spectacular range of case studies, including Disney, LEGO and Johnson & Johnson, all delivered with active takeaways, this is the ultimate handbook for any leader, business or marketing strategist, ready to pave the way in a new era of customer led strategy.

Learn how to cultivate the most incredible customer experiences on earth through this essential guide by Colin Cowie, distinguished purveyor of unforgettable "wow" events for the world's most demanding clients. If you're searching for ways to ensure your customers walk away from your company with a smile on their face and a plan to return, you found it. And any business organization can adapt the tools and techniques in this book. Colin Cowie, one of the world's most sought-after event planners, shares the hard-won and hard-nosed advice he has learned through entertaining and engaging stories and examples. He gives readers the indisputable blueprint for creating a customer-service culture that anyone can tailor to their own needs, whether you're a shopkeeper, corporate marketing director, or budding event planner. Upon coming to the United States from South Africa with $400 in his pocket, Colin built his highly successful catering and event-planning business from the ground up to become event planner to the most respected tastemakers and personalities in the world-including Oprah Winfrey, Jennifer Lopez, Ryan Seacrest, and Kim Kardashian, to name a few. In this book, you will: Learn how to formulate your own vision, mission statements, and guiding principles, and effectively communicate them to your team. Learn how you can align your vision with your essential mission statement. Discover the core values, including service and accountability, that fuel Colin's customer-care ethos, and how you can apply those values to your own business. Have a renewed understanding of how vitally important it is that you take good care of the people who work for you so they, in turn, can care for your customers. Become armed to inspire and empower your team. Be guided to create your own "bible" of scripts, protocols, and procedures that will streamline customer-care situations while making every customer feel like their individual desires are being taken care of. Learn how to use every complaint as an opportunity, as well as why you should be more afraid of a client who doesn't complain when something goes wrong versus one who does.

Almost every advertising, promotion, or marketing communications textbook is based on an inside-out approach, focusing on what the marketer wants to communicate to customers and prospects. This text takes a different view - that the marketer and the customer build the ongoing brand value together. Rather than the marketer trying to 'sell', the role of the marketer is to help customer buy. To do that, a customer view is vital and customer insight is essential. Customer insights allow the marketer to understand which audiences are important for a product, what delivery forms are appropriate, and what type of content is beneficial. "Building Customer-Brand Relationships" is themed around the four key elements marketing communicators use in developing programs - audiences, brands, delivery, and content - but provides an innovative approach to marketing communications in the 'push-pull' marketplace that combines traditional outbound communications (advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, and PR) with the inbound or 'pull' media of Internet, mobile communications, social networks, and more. Its 'customer-centric' media planning approach covers media decision before dealing with creative development, and emphasizes measurement and accountability. The text's concepts have been used successfully around the world, and can be adapted and adjusted to any type of product or service.

To stay in business and thrive during this recession, companies need to focus and hone their value. If clients complain about the cost of a product or service, then a company is not demonstrating the superior value of their product or service. Discounting is always an option, but this means losing value during the sale - value that will be hard to regain in the future.

Instead, companies need to prove their superior value to clients using bottom-line terms - i.e. they need strong value propositions. "Creating and Delivering Your Value Proposition" shows how to do this. It explains what a value proposition is and how to build and deliver one. The authors argue that, contrary to the norm, value propositions cannot rest on unsupported marketing claims. Rather, a value proposition must be must be created at the strategy level and expressed in measurable terms.

Customers today demand a highly personalised and unique purchasing experience: they require expert guidance in a purchasing process that is relevant and efficient from start to finish. Less Contact, More Impact explores the dynamics of corporate sales today and in the future as a function of trust and cooperation. The RIO model developed by Belgium-based Blinc Sales Institute marks the evolution of a new era in which genuine contact between client and salesperson is crucial to meeting the challenges of customer expectations. The goal of this book is to guide sales in the digital age in order to achieve maximum personal impact, better results, and consistent customer satisfaction in a minimum amount of time.

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.

This cutting-edge reference represents a new phase in the talkRA project-an initiative dedicated to improving the discipline of revenue assurance (RA) for communication providers. From blog to podcasts and now a book, the project offers a platform for a select group of RA experts to share ideas and best practices in revenue assurance, revenue management, business intelligence, and fraud prevention in telecommunications and other industries. Drawing on the expertise and insights of some of the leading minds in RA, Revenue Assurance: Expert Opinions for Communications Providers supplies high-powered ideas and techniques for the effective management, planning, strategy formulation, and measurement of RA performance. Presented as a series of articles on current and emerging topics of interest, it provides extensive and multi-faceted guidance to help readers move up the scale from basic checks to optimizing performance. Covers the fundamentals of revenue assurance Explains the relationship between revenue assurance and fraud management and how revenue assurance sits within the wider context of enterprise risk management and the control environment Provokes readers to think of creative ways to adapt RA to the needs of their business, whether they are initiating the RA process or seeking to take an established RA function to the next level Shows how to measure the financial benefits delivered by the RA team and how to appraise the RA maturity of the whole business Illustrates how to perform root cause analysis through Q&A discussion of how top experts deal with a variety of leakages Identifies trends in how RA techniques are changing, and links these to developments in tools and technology Entertains through sympathetic and sometimes irreverently humorous observations about the working life of an RA practitioner The book provides an analysis of the drivers for RA products and services, enabling RA suppliers and consultants to compare their competitive offerings with what customers really want and need. Complete with real-world tips and case examples, it supplies the well-rounded understanding that will enable you to best fit the needs of your business and best support its objectives. This book will give you the confidence to determine the most effective and efficient methods to achieve and maintain healthy revenue streams in the ever-changing landscape of electronic communications. Praise for: ... draws upon the actual experience of a number of RA professionals-those who have actually lived through the journey, learned from setbacks, and adapted their approaches to determine best practices in the field. -Julian Hebden, Director of Enterprise Information Management, Telstra

The ability to look after your customers is crucial to anyone who wants to advance their career. Written by Di McLanachan, a leading expert on customer care as both a coach and a practitioner, this book quickly teaches you the insider secrets you need to know to in order to keep your customers happy and coming back. The highly motivational 'in a week' structure of the book provides seven straightforward chapters explaining the key points, and at the end there are optional questions to ensure you have taken it all in. There are also cartoons and diagrams throughout, to help make this book a more enjoyable and effective learning experience. So what are you waiting for? Let this book put you on the fast track to success!