Customer Business

The solution in each case was a focus on customer experience, the most powerful - and misunderstood - element of corporate strategy today. Customer experience is, quite simply, how your customers perceive their every interaction with your company. It’s a fundamental business driver. Here’s proof: over a recent five-year period during which the S&P 500 was flat, a stock portfolio of customer experience leaders grew 22 percent.

In the old days, when we made physical products, setting project goals wasn’t that hard. But in today’s service - and software-driven world, “done” is less obvious. When is Amazon done? When is Google done? Or Facebook? In reality, services powered by digital systems are never done. So then how do we give teams a goal that they can work on? Mostly, we simply ask teams to build features - but features are the wrong way to go. We often build features that create no value. Instead, we need to give teams an outcome to achieve.

Buyer Personas is the marketer's actionable guide to learning what your buyer wants and how they make decisions. Written by the world's leading authority on buyer personas, this audiobook provides comprehensive coverage of a compelling new way to conduct buyer studies, plus practical advice on adopting the buyer persona approach to measurably improve marketing outcomes. Listeners will learn how to segment their customer base, investigate each customer type, and apply a radically more relevant process of message selection, content creation, and distribution.

In Redesigning Thinking, Clive Grinyer discusses service design – the holistic process of managing all the points in a customer’s journey with the provider, from the initial introduction down to the last customer interaction, with the purpose of designing each interaction and experience in a way that is user-friendly and relevant to the customer.

Any organization can win more customers and increase sales if they learn to be more strategic with their customer service. When customers complain, employees respond. The typical service model is riddled with holes. What about people and businesses who never speak up, but never come back? Learn...

If all the practice consultants and marketing experts have such great ideas to share, why aren't they using them to run their own successful practices? Finally, a book that offers not just ideas but proven strategies for transforming any financial practice into a highly effective value-delivering machine. Practicing financial advisor Matthew Jarvis uses these exact strategies to run his own wildly successful investment firm.

Learn to launch, grow, and scale your membership business with Stu McLaren, founder of Membership.io and host of the Marketing Your Business podcast. Are you tired of wondering how much money you'll make every single month? Do you wish there was an easier way to predict your income and watch...

Chief Customer Officer 2.0 will give you a proven framework that has launched and advanced the customer experience transformation in businesses around the world. And it will take years off your learning curve. Written by Jeanne Bliss, worldwide authority on customer experience, and preeminent thought leader on the role of the customer leadership executive, this book follows the five-competency model she uses to coach the C-Suite and chief customer officers.

The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a start-up or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice.

Still struggling through the financial crisis that began in 2008, consumers aren't buying traditional sales approaches anymore. So how do salespeople, corporate communicators, managers, and marketers sell their ideas, products, and services to a generation of customers who are more skeptical and less influenced by conventional marketing than ever before?

Whether you're in the trenches or the boardroom, you're going to encounter demanding, dissatisfied, and disagreeable customers. Are your people (and you) prepared to deal with them? Ignore a valid complaint and you could be the next viral sensation for all the wrong reasons. But give in to every demand and you may be consumed with the often petty complaints of your worst customers and wind up pandering to them with freebies, discounts, and special attention.

Customer Data and Privacy: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review will help you understand the tangled interdependencies and complexities and develop strategies that allow your company to be good stewards, collecting, using, and storing customer data responsibly.

Companies have invested thousands and even millions of dollars in CRM technology over the past decade, but frontline salespeople and sales executives alike are still groping for solutions. The problem of drift - a common phenomenon in which a prospect simply forgets about the product offering and goes dark - is persistent and rampant. Technology doesn't change behavior on its own. Behavior is changed by adopting better habits. The fact is, 44 percent of salespeople give up after one follow-up attempt. That sad reality presents a genuine opportunity.

Which would you rather have: a smaller, watertight bucket of loyal customers or a larger leaky bucket of both loyal and not-so-loyal customers? In Customer Portfolio Management, Fred Selnes and Michael Johnson argue that for most companies and organizations the larger leaky bucket is more valuable.

What is it that made Starbucks an overnight sensation and separated it from other coffee house companies? Why do many products with great product innovation, perfect locations, terrific customer experiences, even breakthrough advertising, fail to get the same visceral traction in the marketplace as brands like Apple and Nike?

The world's most successful businesses leaders understand that creating a shared social identity around their products and services is the most efficient path to scaling revenue, differentiating products, promoting customer success and retention, and seizing category ownership. The Business of Belonging is the playbook for doing just that. CMX founder David Spinks offers advice for creating community strategy, aligning it with your business objectives, and launching and managing a community of end users.

Conversation Marketing will help you connect your brands, not just to the minds of your consumers, but to their hearts. Slick slogans and catchy ads may still work in some instances, but today's discerning consumers demand more. They want information and a reason to connect with a brand before they act. They want a conversation.

Wayne McCulloch has more than 25 years of experience in the software industry — years spent in training, adoption, and customer experience, the building blocks for customer success. Now he’s sharing what he knows as a chief customer officer leading global success functions. In The Seven Pillars of Customer Success, Wayne provides an adaptable framework for building a strong customer success organization.

Clayton M. Christensen is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School. Michael E. Raynor is a director at Deloitte Research. Together, they outline an innovative plan that urges businesses to create disruption rather than fleeing from it. Named one of 2003's Best Business Books by Business Week, this book is a Wall Street Journal and New York Times best seller.

In Marketing 6.0, the celebrated promoter of the "Four P's of Marketing," Philip Kotler, explains how marketers can use technology to address customers' needs and make a difference in the world. In a new age of metamarketing, this book provides marketers with a way to integrate technological and business model evolution with the dramatic shifts in consumer behavior that have happened in the last decade.