Stop Listening to the Customer


Book Description

Don't let the customer get between you and building a strong valued brand If you want to stand out from the crowd, develop a clear and consistent brand voice, and ultimately build a fruitful business – listen to your brand. Stop Listening to the Customer offers insights into how consumers are driving homogeneity in brands and shares the proven strategies you can implement to amplify your own position in the world. The customer is not always right. In fact, our obsession with the customer risks devaluing brands by making them generic and forgettable. Brands have become too consumer-led, where they are driven by journey-mapping, customer-centric design, and an excessive focus on consumer-driven data. Instead try redressing the balance, and be brand-led, where brands and businesses can truly become unique, interesting and highly profitable. Multi-award-winning brand strategist and consumer psychologist Adam Ferrier shares his contrary approach to building a strong brand in Stop Listening to the Customer. Backed by science, real-world examples and extensive industry experience, Ferrier explores the dangers of listening to the consumer too much, shares lessons from successful businesses who prioritise their brand, and reveals the brand-building secrets of their success. With insights from Jules Lund, Lisa Ronson, John Newcomb, Rory Sutherland, and many more, this invaluable book will enable you to: • Avoid the pitfalls of drowning in customer data • Establish a strong, brand-led business • Develop a unique brand by embracing and leveraging your weaknesses • Define your brand • Get your customers to invest into you Stop Listening to the Customer is ideal for those looking to grow their brands and businesses by defeating consumer-driven mediocrity, standing out from the crowd, and listening their own brand.




Conversion Optimization


Book Description

How do you turn website visitors into customers? Conversion Optimization offers practical advice on how to persuade visitors to make a buying decision -- without driving them away through data overload or tedious navigation. You'll learn how to use marketing principles, design, usability, and analytics on your site to increase your buyer-to-visitor ratio, whether you're involved with marketing or designing a large ecommerce site, or managing a modest online operation. Based on the authors' broad experience in helping businesses attract online customers, this book addresses every aspect of the process, from landing visitors to finalizing the sale. You'll learn several techniques for blending successful sales approaches with the particular needs of the people you want to attract. Are you ready to do what it takes to get a double-digit conversion rate? Explore case studies involving significant conversion rate improvements Walk through different stages of a sale and understand the value of each Understand your website visitors through persona creation Connect with potential customers and guide them toward a conversion Learn how to deal with FUDs -- customer fears, uncertainties, and doubts Examine the path that visitors take from landing page to checkout Test any change you make against your original design "The Web is unique in its ability to deliver this almost improbable win-win: You can increase revenue AND make your customers happy. Yet most websites stink. Worry not, Khalid and Ayat to the rescue! Buy this book to follow their practical advice on how to create high converting websites that your visitors love."--Avinash Kaushik, author of Web Analytics 2.0 and Web Analytics: An Hour A Day (both Sybex)




Stop Listening


Book Description

Stop Listening is an unapologetically blunt, autobiographical blueprint for those who strive to turn off traditional business, money, and life advice and replace it with real, raw, and achievable actions that will yield extraordinary results.




Ask a Manager


Book Description

From the creator of the popular website Ask a Manager and New York’s work-advice columnist comes a witty, practical guide to 200 difficult professional conversations—featuring all-new advice! There’s a reason Alison Green has been called “the Dear Abby of the work world.” Ten years as a workplace-advice columnist have taught her that people avoid awkward conversations in the office because they simply don’t know what to say. Thankfully, Green does—and in this incredibly helpful book, she tackles the tough discussions you may need to have during your career. You’ll learn what to say when • coworkers push their work on you—then take credit for it • you accidentally trash-talk someone in an email then hit “reply all” • you’re being micromanaged—or not being managed at all • you catch a colleague in a lie • your boss seems unhappy with your work • your cubemate’s loud speakerphone is making you homicidal • you got drunk at the holiday party Praise for Ask a Manager “A must-read for anyone who works . . . [Alison Green’s] advice boils down to the idea that you should be professional (even when others are not) and that communicating in a straightforward manner with candor and kindness will get you far, no matter where you work.”—Booklist (starred review) “The author’s friendly, warm, no-nonsense writing is a pleasure to read, and her advice can be widely applied to relationships in all areas of readers’ lives. Ideal for anyone new to the job market or new to management, or anyone hoping to improve their work experience.”—Library Journal (starred review) “I am a huge fan of Alison Green’s Ask a Manager column. This book is even better. It teaches us how to deal with many of the most vexing big and little problems in our workplaces—and to do so with grace, confidence, and a sense of humor.”—Robert Sutton, Stanford professor and author of The No Asshole Rule and The Asshole Survival Guide “Ask a Manager is the ultimate playbook for navigating the traditional workforce in a diplomatic but firm way.”—Erin Lowry, author of Broke Millennial: Stop Scraping By and Get Your Financial Life Together




The Compassionate Geek


Book Description

Note: There is a newer version of this book available. Please look up ISBN 978-0983660736. A real-world, plain-language how-to guide for delivering amazing customer service to end-users. Now in its second edition, The Compassionate Geek was written by tech people for tech people. There are no frills, just best practices and ideas that actually work! Filled with practical tips, best practices, and real-world techniques, The Compassionate Geek is a quick read with equally fast results. Here's what you'll find: Best practices for communicating with email, including examples The four intrinsic qualities of great service providers Best practices for communicating using chat and texting Ten tips for being a good listener Two practical ways to keep your emotions in check A flow chart for handling user calls What to do when the user is wrong How to work with the different generations in the workplace All of the information is presented in a straightforward style that you can understand and use right away. There's nothing "foo-foo," just down-to-earth tips and best practices learned from years of working with IT pros and end-users.




Build Better Products


Book Description

It’s easier than ever to build a new product. But developing a great product that people actually want to buy and use is another story. Build Better Products is a hands-on, step-by-step guide that helps teams incorporate strategy, empathy, design, and analytics into their development process. You’ll learn to develop products and features that improve your business’s bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience.




Dancing with the Customer


Book Description

We are at a defining moment in thinking about competitiveness. Customer service is no longer an extension of business. It is the core of it. Nor is rendering good service sufficient. The global economy is heaving sea and if you don't attain supremacy in customer service you may find yourself drowning. However, if you follow the 101 practical lessons in this book your business will take a quantum leap.




The Complete Idiot's Guide to Great Customer Service


Book Description

You're no idiot, of course. You skillfully manage your kids' temper tantrums, diplomatically handle office politics, and even pleasantly deal with your friends' bickering. But when it comes to handling customer service, you feel utterly lost. It's time to make great customer service an indispensable part of your daily operation! The Complete Idiot's Guide® to Great Customer Service teaches you how to create the "Service Difference"—service that genuinely pleases your customers and sets your organization apart from the pack.




Smart Selling on the Phone and Online


Book Description

In an age of telesales and digital selling, this award-winning business book pinpoints the ten skills essential to high-efficiency, high-success sales performance based on the author’s TeleSmart 10 System for Power Selling. Bestselling author and TeleSmart Communications president Josiane Feigon equips salespeople with the powerful tools they need to open stronger, build trust faster, handle objections better, and close more sales when dealing with customers they can’t see face-to-face. In Smart Selling on the Phone and Online, you’ll learn how to: overcome ten different forms of “paralysis” and reestablish momentum; sell in sound bites, not long-winded speeches; ask the right questions to reveal customer needs; navigate around obstacles to get to the power buyer; and prioritize and manage your time so that more of it is spent actually selling. The world of selling keeps changing, and sales professionals are on the front line of innovation to keep profits flowing. Combining an accessible text with clear graphics and step-by-step processes, Smart Selling on the Phone and Online will help any rep master the world of sales 2.0 and become a true sales warrior.




Never Lose a Customer Again


Book Description

Award-winning speaker and business consultant Joey Coleman teaches audiences and companies all over the world how to turn a one-time purchaser into a lifelong customer. Coleman's theory of building customer loyalty isn't about focusing on marketing or closing the sale: It's about the First 100 Days® after the sale and the interactions the customer experiences. While new customers experience joy, euphoria, and excitement, these feelings quickly shift to fear, doubt, and uncertainty as buyer's remorse sets in. Across all industries, somewhere between 20%-70% of newly acquired customers will stop doing business with a company with the first 100 days of being a new customer because they feel neglected in the early stages of customer onboarding. In Never Lose a Customer Again, Coleman offers a philosophy and methodology for dramatically increasing customer retention and as a result, the bottom line. He identifies eight distinct emotional phases customers go through in the 100 days following a purchase. From an impulse buy at Starbucks to the thoughtful purchase of a first house, all customers have the potential to experience the eight phases of the customer journey. If you can understand and anticipate the customers' emotions, you can apply a myriad of tools and techniques -- in-person, email, phone, mail, video, and presents -- to cement a long and valuable relationship. Coleman's system is presented through research and case studies showing how best-in-class companies create remarkable customer experiences at each step in the customer lifecycle. In the "Acclimate" stage, customers need you to hold their hand and over-explain how to use your product or service. They're often too embarrassed to admit they're confused. Take a cue from Canadian software company PolicyMedical and their challenge of getting non-technical users to undergo a complex installation and implementation process. They turned a series of project spreadsheets and installation manuals into a beautiful puzzle customers could assemble after completing each milestone. In the "Adopt" stage, customers should be welcomed to the highest tier of tribal membership with both public and private recognitions. For instance, Sephora's VIB Rogue member welcome gift provides a metallic membership card (private recognition) and a members-only shade of lipstick (for public display). In the final stage, "Advocate," loyal customers and raving fans are primed to provide powerful referrals. That's how elite entrepreneurial event MastermindTalks continues to sell-out their conference year after year - with zero dollars spent on marketing. By surprising their loyal fans with amazing referral bonuses (an all-expenses paid safari?!) they guarantee their community will keep providing perfect referrals. Drawing on nearly two decades of consulting and keynoting, Coleman provides strategies and systems to increase customer loyalty. Applicable to companies in any industry and of any size (whether measured in employee count, revenue, or total number of customers), implementing his methods regularly leads to an increase in profits of 25-100%. Working with well-known clients like Hyatt Hotels, Zappos, and NASA, as well as mom-and-pop shops and solo entrepreneurs around the world, Coleman's customer retention system has produced incredible results in dozens of industries. His approach to creating remarkable customer experiences requires minimal financial investment and will be fun for owners, employees, and teams to implement. This book is required reading for business owners, CEOs, and managers - as well as sales and marketing teams, account managers, and customer service representatives looking for easy to implement action steps that result in lasting change, increased profits, and lifelong customer retention.