Why Customers Do What They Do


Book Description

A chief analyst at the NPD Group delivers a breakthrough branding and sales strategy that speaks the customer's language.




Anticipate


Book Description

Design and implement the ideal customer focus Anticipate provides business readers with a practical how-to approach for taking their customer-supplier relationship to one that is more sustainable and more mutually profitable. Much of the discussion on customer experience has centered on the hospitality or retail industries and has showcased the discrete techniques organizations use to deliver better service and create more satisfied customers. Anticipate extends and integrates those techniques to deliver an end-to-end customer experience that can be applied in any industry, by any type of organization. Get proven guidance on how to design and implement a customer-focused journey that moves beyond the transaction and satisfied customers, to a relationship and culture that creates and leverages loyalty – and the profitability that comes with it. Explains proprietary methods—such as the Customer Focus Maturity Model ® and Value Chain Labs ® —that teach readers the steps and tools organizations use to create, drive and optimize their customer focus. Authors Bill Thomas and Jeff Tobe have used their 10-point framework to guide Fortune 500’s, start-ups as well as non-profits in charting a customer-focused journey that matures, anticipates and delivers increasing levels of loyalty and profitability with their customers, and across their broader value chain. Anticipate will provide you with field-proven steps, tools and examples that you’ll use to take your customer-focused strategy, execution and culture to the ideal level.




Ignore Your Customers (and They'll Go Away)


Book Description

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.




The Paradox of Choice


Book Description

Whether we're buying a pair of jeans, ordering a cup of coffee, selecting a long-distance carrier, applying to college, choosing a doctor, or setting up a 401(k), everyday decisions—both big and small—have become increasingly complex due to the overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented. As Americans, we assume that more choice means better options and greater satisfaction. But beware of excessive choice: choice overload can make you question the decisions you make before you even make them, it can set you up for unrealistically high expectations, and it can make you blame yourself for any and all failures. In the long run, this can lead to decision-making paralysis, anxiety, and perpetual stress. And, in a culture that tells us that there is no excuse for falling short of perfection when your options are limitless, too much choice can lead to clinical depression. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz explains at what point choice—the hallmark of individual freedom and self-determination that we so cherish—becomes detrimental to our psychological and emotional well-being. In accessible, engaging, and anecdotal prose, Schwartz shows how the dramatic explosion in choice—from the mundane to the profound challenges of balancing career, family, and individual needs—has paradoxically become a problem instead of a solution. Schwartz also shows how our obsession with choice encourages us to seek that which makes us feel worse. By synthesizing current research in the social sciences, Schwartz makes the counter intuitive case that eliminating choices can greatly reduce the stress, anxiety, and busyness of our lives. He offers eleven practical steps on how to limit choices to a manageable number, have the discipline to focus on those that are important and ignore the rest, and ultimately derive greater satisfaction from the choices you have to make.




How Customers Think


Book Description

Despite the time and money spent on market research, 60% to 80% of new offerings fail.




Uncommon Service


Book Description

Offers an organizational design model for service organizations, covering such topics as funding mechanisms, employee management systems, and customer management systems.




How Customers Buy...& Why They Don’t


Book Description

Lewis makes a compelling argument that businesses must look beyond their own internal view of how something is sold, to the external reality of how customers actually buy. He asserts that no one buys anything because of a sales process; customers only buy because of their own buying process. And so, for all those whose livelihood depends upon successful revenue generation, the only rational course of action is to positively influence and effectively manage the end-to-end customer-buying journey. The simple failure of mousetrap logic—that is, the quality of the product or value proposition of the service is sufficient to convince customers to make a purchase—is at the heart of most revenue generation challenges today. How Customers Buy...and Why They Don’t shows that vendors are too often trying to solve the wrong problem, because customers actually do “get it,” they just don’t buy it. The book starts by explaining Outside-in Revenue Generation. It then decodes the six elements of the Customer Buying Journey DNA. It defines the nine Buying Concerns, any one of which can derail a purchase. It unveils the deceptively simple and elegant 4Q Buying Style Quadrant that unlocks the intricacies of how buyers actually think. The second section of the book explains what you can do about customers not buying your products or services. It reveals that there are only four things—Sales and Marketing Imperatives—that can be done to positively impact the market. It goes on to walk the reader through the development of the Market Engagement Strategy. The final section of the book translates the five components of the Market Engagement Strategy into actionable sales and marketing behaviors.




INSPIRED


Book Description

How do today’s most successful tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Tesla—design, develop, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies. In INSPIRED, technology product management thought leader Marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business. With sections on assembling the right people and skillsets, discovering the right product, embracing an effective yet lightweight process, and creating a strong product culture, readers can take the information they learn and immediately leverage it within their own organizations—dramatically improving their own product efforts. Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, consistent innovation, and business success. Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, including Adobe, Apple, BBC, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love. The first edition of INSPIRED, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.




All Customers Are Irrational


Book Description

As many businesses are discovering, customer behavior doesn’t always make sense. That really shouldn’t be surprising. As recent studies have shown, people tend to base their decisions on more subconscious, emotional desires than on rational, practical choices. What’s more, customers aren’t able to tell you accurately why they do what they do. Combining recent research findings with real-world examples from his consulting practice on customer experience, William J. Cusick examines how the sub­con­scious part of the brain drives the decisions and behavior of every customer on a daily basis and introduces the concept of "the irrational customer." All Customers Are Irrational shows why businesses must change their approach to attracting and retaining customers, and proposes ways they can alter their strategies on everything from customer research, product design and website development to call center management, employee recruitment, and retail store layouts, by focusing on what customers are actually doing instead of what they’re saying. Honest, direct and insightful, All Customers Are Irrational will help businesses tap into the impulses and motivations that both attract and retain consumers for the long haul.




Superconsumers


Book Description

Pork dorks. Craftsters. American Girl fans. Despite their different tastes, these eclectic diehards have a lot in common: they’re obsessed about a specific brand, product, or category. They pursue their passions with fervor, and they’re extremely knowledgeable about the things they love. They aren’t average consumers—they’re superconsumers. Although small in number, superconsumers can have an outsized impact on a company’s bottom line. Representing 10% of total consumers, they can drive between 30% to 70% of sales, and they’re usually willing to spend considerably more than the average consumer. And because they’re so engaged and passionate, they can offer invaluable advice to managers looking to improve their products, change their business models, energize their cultures, and attract new customers. In Superconsumers, growth strategy expert Eddie Yoon lays out a simple but extremely effective framework that has helped companies of all types and sizes achieve more sustainable growth: he’ll show you how to find, listen to, and engage with your most passionate and profitable consumers, and then tailor your decisions to meet their wants and needs. Along the way, he’ll let you into the minds and homes of superconsumers of all kinds, revealing what makes them tick and why they’re willing to spend so much more than other consumers. Rich with data and case studies of companies that have implemented superconsumer strategies with great success, Superconsumers is a fun, practical, and inspiring guide for anyone interested in making their best customers even better.