Inside Your Customer's Imagination


Book Description

“A journey into a powerful idea . . . the more people you involve as creators and contributors, the greater your innovation capacity.” —Polly LaBarre, New York Times-bestselling coauthor of Mavericks at Work Organizations need to offer customers breakthrough products, services, and solutions to effectively compete in today’s innovation-hungry economy. The challenge is customers often don’t know precisely what they want. As Henry Ford is reputed to have said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” To surprise and awe your customers, Chip Bell advises developing co-creation partnerships with them. Co-creation partnerships are about fulfilling customers’ hopes and aspirations, not just their needs and expectations. Co-creation partnerships require (1) curiosity that uncovers insight, (2) grounding that promotes clear focus, (3) discovery that fosters risk-taking, (4) trust that safeguards partnership purity, and (5) passion that inspires energized generosity. Using examples from organizations like McDonald’s, DHL, Marriott, Lockheed Martin, Discover Financial, Ultimate Software, and many more, Bell shows how co-creation partnerships enable you to tap into the treasure trove of ideas, ingenuity, and genius-in-the-raw within every customer. “Innovation through partnership is the blueprint for business growth in the future. Inside Your Customer’s Imagination provides the instruction and inspiration to make it a success.”—Marshall Goldsmith, #1 New York Times-bestselling author “Chip Bell’s unique perspective, lively illustrations, and practical advice result in one terrific resource for anyone eager to tap a customer’s ingenuity for creating breakthrough results.” —Jeanne Bliss, founder and CEO, CustomerBliss; and cofounder, Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA)




Inside My Imagination


Book Description

Winner of the Living Now Awards 2013, International Latino Book Awards 2013 and Moonbeam Children Books Awards 2013. There is a door in every one of us that leads to our imagination, a world where anything is possible. Dou you dare to embark on the most wonderful journey to our inner-self? One day when I was reading my story, I breathed in one of the words and something magical happened... I entered my imagination! We have always been told about the power of imagination, but what is imagination? How does it work? There is a magical place where you can always be yourself. In there you can turn on your light and illuminate your life with it. That place is your imagination. Your imagination has a life and a voice of its own. It is like a voice that speaks inside of you and paints everything around you with vivid colors. Within your imagination you are the king or queen of your creation. Open the door and discover how that place where we can always be ourselves is like and how does it work. And within your imagination... what is there? Read the first pages of Inside my imagination here below:




The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design


Book Description

A theoretically informed investigation that relates the philosophies of aesthetics and imagination to understanding design practice. In The Aesthetics of Imagination in Design, Mads Folkmann investigates design in both material and immaterial terms. Design objects, Folkmann argues, will always be dual phenomena—material and immaterial, sensual and conceptual, actual and possible. Drawing on formal theories of aesthetics and the phenomenology of imagination, he seeks to answer fundamental questions about what design is and how it works that are often ignored in academic research. Folkmann considers three conditions in design: the possible, the aesthetic, and the imagination. Imagination is a central formative power behind the creation and the life of design objects; aesthetics describes the sensual, conceptual, and contextual codes through which design objects communicate; the concept of the possible—the enabling of new uses, conceptions, and perceptions—lies behind imagination and aesthetics. The possible, Folkmann argues, is contained as a structure of meaning within the objects of design, which act as part of our interface with the world. Taking a largely phenomenological perspective that reflects both continental and American pragmatist approaches, Folkmann also makes use of discourses that range from practice-focused accounts of design methodology to cultural studies. Throughout, he offers concrete examples to illustrate theoretical points. Folkmann's philosophically informed account shows design—in all its manifestations, from physical products to principles of organization—to be an essential medium for the articulation and transformation of culture.




How to Appreciate Your Customers


Book Description

Appreciating and satisfying the emotional heads of buyers can be the essential factor contributing to the creation of a competitive edge, particularly where close uniformity of quality, price and service exists between competing suppliers. This book looks at the factors influencing buying decisions and the supplier's response to the customer. Sensitive situations, such as the handling of complaints, are dealt with specifically, as is the way in which companies can implement the cultural changes necessary to move an organisation towards a greater recognition of individual buyers' needs.




The Republic of Imagination


Book Description

A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.




Why Selling Sucks and Building Relationships Work?


Book Description

Are you new to customer service? Or maybe you are already in customer service and would like to sharpen your service skills? Or perhaps you are employed in the back office & you would like to gain a better understanding of your customers or the servicing process? Whatever your reasons, 'Why Selling Sucks & Building Relationships Work', is a guide to providing exceptional customer service. Geared toward frontline staff and helpful for anyone who is involved in serving customers, the book will help you to: - Better understand your customers so you can service them to their satisfaction - Build better rapport with your customers, colleagues, and suppliers - Communicate more confidently and be more persuasive with your customers - Develop business relationships with your key customers so they keep coming back to you with their business - Manage difficult customers and complaints efficiently - Manage your stress levels - Apply closing techniques - Field customer objections more proficiently - Enjoy your work and grow rapidly within your organization. Written in simple language, and loaded with case studies, self-assessments, and real-life examples, this guide provides practical advice to make sure your customers keep coming back to you.




Delight Your Customers


Book Description

Discover the hidden ways to raise your organizations’ customer service experiences from ordinary to extraordinary. If you want to know how strong your company’s customer service is, ask your employees to describe what their work entails. Then pay attention to whether they simply list their duties and tasks or if they speak to the true essence of their job--to create delighted customers who will be less price sensitive, have higher repurchase rates, and enthusiastically recommend the company or brand to others. The latter should be every employee’s highest priority, because when it’s not, your customers are merely the recipients of a transaction, not an experience, and transactions do not make for a lasting impression or inspire loyalty. In Delight Your Customers, customer service expert Steve Curtin makes a compelling case that customer service managers need to shift from monitoring service activities to modeling, recognizing, and reinforcing the behaviors that create happy and returning customers. Things such as: Expressing genuine interest Offering sincere compliments Sharing unique knowledge Conveying authentic enthusiasm Providing pleasant surprises Delivering service heroics when needed Simply based on their own personal experiences, everyone knows that great customer service is rare. So why wouldn’t you want to provide a unique, caring, and beneficial experience for all your customers to rave about with others? With the real-world stories, examples, and strategies shared in Delight Your Customers, you can take the customer service experience you offer from ordinary to extraordinary.




Selling in Customer Service


Book Description

"Service" in this book refers to the behaviors and actions of serving customers. "Selling" in this book refers to the behaviors and actions of selling products to customers. Hence, this book is completely different from other books on these subjects—Despite the fact that there are many books on service improvement and many related to selling skills worldwide, there are few books on how service and selling are integrated and coordinated. Primarily, it focuses on the interaction and transition between "the behavior of service" and "the behavior of selling" by sharing methods and skills of how those two are interrelated. This book provides many helpful guidelines and solutions for turning customers’ satisfaction with service into growth in sales. Through many refreshing ideas, the author helps you deeply understand the significance of integration of and conversion between service and selling and the harm of disconnection between service and selling. Many new ideas and viewpoints, which are different from other service books or sales books, are discussed, such as the contention that "over-service and over-selling should be prevented." Instead of: Giving highly complex and abstract definitions of "service" or "selling," this book redefines service and selling with "say YES to customers" and "Make customers say YES" respectively. Insisting that customers’ satisfaction with service will naturally lead to their long-term loyalty, this book emphasizes that customers' satisfaction with service has a shelf lifetime, which will soon fade over time. Taking the achievement of customer satisfaction as the final purpose of service, the author believes that "the end of service is not customer satisfaction, but to create new customer needs and achieve increased sales." Taking "meeting or exceeding customer expectations" as the golden rule, the author insists that "customer expectations need to be reduced first, then satisfied, and upgraded finally." Focusing on the development of customers’ buying needs like other books do, this book focuses oppositely on the research of "why customers have no buying needs."







The Complete Idiot's Guide to Marketing


Book Description

In today's business environment, many professionals are getting back to the basics of key topics such as marketing. In this new edition of the popular The Complete Idiot's Guide to Marketing, author Sarah White gives a comprehensive update on marketing today. She takes a firm foundation of the basics and adds to it accessible marketing techniques including guerrilla marketing, marketing to the Baby Boomer generation, online marketing, targeted affordable direct mail, and more! With all the formal material readers need for positioning products or services including marketing plans, distribution strategies, and more, this completely updated edition is the book readers need for today! New coverage includes sample marketing plans for several types of small business – and a couple of larger projects; practical do-it-yourself strategies and tactics; how to analyze business segments, trends, etc.