With emerging technology transforming customer expectations, it's important to keep a laser focus on the experience companies provide their customers. Tomorrow's customers need to be targeted today! Customer experience futurist Blake Morgan outlines ten easy-to-follow customer experience guidelines that integrate emerging technologies with effective strategies to combat disconnected processes, silo mentalities, and a lack of buyer perspective. The Customer of the Future explains how today's customers are already demanding frictionless, personalized, on-demand experiences from their products and services, and companies that don't adapt to these new expectations won't last. This book prepares your organization for these increas ing demands by helping you do the following: Learn the ten defining strategies for a customer experience-focused company. Implement new techniques to shift the entire company from being product-focused to being customer-focused. Gain insights through case studies and examples on how the world's most innovative companies are offering new and compelling customer experiences. Tomorrow's customers will insist on experiences that make their lives significantly easier and better. Craft a leadership development and culture plan to create lasting change at your organization!

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.

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.

This book constitutes revised papers from the eight workshops which were held during June 2021 at the 24th International Conference on Business Information Systems, BIS 2021. The conference was planned to take place in Hannover, Germany, and changed to a fully online event due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a total of 67 submissions to all workshops of which 31papers were accepted for publication. The workshops included in this volume are: AKTB 2021: 12th Workshop on Applications of Knowledge-Based Technologies in Business BisEd 2021: BIS Education: Trends and Challenges DigBD 2021: 1st Workshop on Digitization in the Flux of Big Data Scenarios DigEx 2021: 3rd International Workshop on transforming the Digital Customer Experience iCRM 2021: 6th International Workshop on Integrated Social CRM QOD 2021: 4th Workshop on Quality of Open Data BITA 2021: 12th Workshop on Business and IT Alignment BSCT 2021: 4th Workshop on Blockchain and Smart Contract Technologies

Owning a B&B is the dream of many ... More and more people are considering downshifting. Buying a property that can pay for its own upkeep and give you a comfortable lifestyle is a popular option. Not only has the interest grown in becoming a B&B proprietor, so has the interest by the public in the B&B as a viable short-break option. With this rise in popularity, however, come expectations, and this is where this book comes in. - It will help you: - Determine who your customers are - Manage the necessary financial tools - Ready your house for B&B service, or help you buy/build a new one - Successfully market your property - Ensure you make a profit from your enterprise. In short, everything you need to know to make your B&B a truly special place to stay! This book has been written for would-be and current B&B owners. It can be used as a short course giving invaluable insights for the experienced and inexperienced alike.

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.

With their word-of mouth advocacy of products or brands, superpromoters influence us and how we buy with the power of enthusiasm. Business managers should not just focus on complaining customers but they should value their enthusiastic friends: the superpromoters. By cultivating the superpromter they can more effectiviely promote their brand.

This book highlights the latest research on sub-supplier management while also discussing its current state and related managerial challenges. It provides a process framework for managing sub-suppliers and an overview of the various buyer / sub-supplier relationships and their key characteristics. Furthermore, the respective chapters address essential capabilities to successfully manage sub-suppliers and to discuss how to overcome barriers and challenges associated with sub-supplier management. Concrete examples and cases are also provided, and, in closing, potential research opportunities are outlined and demonstrated.

When was the last time you received WOW worthy customer service from a business? Have you ever been curious how some companies consistently deliver this WOW factor? Pattern for Excellence is designed to help business owners create WOW Experiences on a daily basis...not one customer at a time, but by building relationships and uniting employees behind a greater cause. This amazing phenomenon begins with your workplace culture and gets transferred to your customers. But, how do you create a culture that over delivers and delights customers? In reading this book, you will be inspired to create a noble purpose in your organization and establish a pattern of excellence. When your company successfully masters these principles, amazing results start to materialize with your customers...on a routine basis. Establishing a workplace culture which consistently delivers WOW customer service is far easier than you would believe. By following the steps in this book, your organization will be on its way to creating raving fans in your industry.

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.

The need for customer friendly organizations exists across fields and industries. Corporate leaders have long known the value of customer support. Even public agency leaders increasingly recognize the need to offer better service to citizens. This book presents the organizational architecture of customer friendly organizations. How do some private companies and public agencies become customer friendly-by accident or design? Academics and practicing managers know that organizational design affects behavior. This book helps us understand how we develop high performance organizations-in this case, organizations that consistently deliver high quality service. It builds on the theory and application of "systems thinking" to organization design and behavior by showing how products, structure, psychological climate, culture, and leadership work together to produce customer friendly experiences. Beginning with the architectural model, the book offers a series of cases to illustrate the application: hospital, auto manufacturer, airline, hotel, bank, university, and library.

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.

The main focus of this course is to provide the necessary skills for effective customer service. The most important people in any successful organization are the staff. Without properly trained and motivated staff no company can provide an effective service to their customers. Well trained staff have confidence and enjoy their work. They are more effective in what they do, and are more capable to meet customer requirements. Training should be an ongoing process, and not just a once off event. It should become part of the company culture, and the accepted way of doing business. Subjects covered in this course include Effective Communication Telephone Skills Listening Skills Dealing with Clients The Main Purpose Of Staff Training Effective Communication. Listening Skills. Customer Loyalty.

The book is written for CEO's, business owners and managers that want to improve the experience they are providing to their customers. Five principles of customer service are illuminated with insightful interviews with CEO's, business owners and employees that consistently demonstrate good customer service. We share illustrations depicting real customer service situations, both good and bad, that bring levity to a serious subject. We also show the financial value of implementing our principles by providing the impact to four business drivers and sharing the harsh reality of data on the sad state of customer service.

When customers are truly thrilled about their experience with a product or service, they have the potential to become one of its influential evangelists. Savvy marketing professionals know that this group of true believers can be leveraged as a potent force to build word of mouth that leads to new customers. Creating Customer Evangelists explains how to develop marketing and sales strategies that create communities of passionate customers. By cultivating a dialogue and then creating emotion-driven relationships with customers, companies can inspire grassroots support. Creating Customer Evangelists shows how to convert good customers into exceptional ones who willingly spread the word. "Lessons of customer evangelism related through real life company stories make this book an absorbing read." -- Harvard Business School "I'll admit it: at first, I was a skeptic. But halfway through this savvy and compelling book, I became a convert. And by the time I'd turned the last page, I'd become an evangelist. Say it with me, brothers and sisters: customer evangelism is the future " -- Dan Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind "An inspiring and thorough book packed with real life examples, action items and insight." -- Emanuel Rosen, author of The Anatomy of Buzz Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell, authors of Citizen Marketers, popularized the term "customer evangelism." The Seth Godin-edited New York Times bestseller The Big Moo featured them among 33 of "the world's smartest business thinkers."

Customer Relationship Management is the strongest and the most efficient approach in creating and maintaining relationships with the customers. Development of a strong personal bonding with people drives the business to the new levels of success. Once this personal/emotional linkage is built, it is very easy for any organization to identify the actual needs of the customers and serve them in a better way. It is a belief that more the sophisticated strategies involved in implementing the customer relationship management, the more strong and fruitful is the business. Most of the organizations apply dedicated world-class tools for maintaining the CRM systems into their workplace. This book explains systematically the various concepts, cardinal principles, significance and other related aspects of CRM, thereby enabling the readers to have a deep insight into its various facets. This book examines the observable and quantifiable relationship-building techniques and explains how they can be adapted for use by large multinational businesses. The purpose of this book is to describe the elements of Customer Relationship Management in a very lucid form as they relate to marketing strategy. In this book, a sincere attempt has been made to provide a very comprehensive understanding of the subject in a systematic and simple form. The book is written to serve as an introductory course in Customer Relationship Management at the undergraduate or graduate levels of courses. Further, this text may be beneficial as an additional reading for most business courses - particularly marketing management as the content focus is on the interaction of marketing concepts and information systems/technology. The cross-functional blend of marketing and information systems can be effective to provide a central focus in customer relationship management and marketing.

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.