For courses in Customer Service, Marketing Principles in two-year vocational/technical schools, and related classes in Business Education. This unique text uses a model with customers at its center, integrating an organization's service philosophy and strategy, its systems, and its people-management policies that enable it to succeed in the 21st century business environment. With its comprehensive coverage of customer service communication "best practices,"Customer Service" provides innovative concepts and techniques appropriate for both experienced and entry-level customer service providers.
For readers of "Delivering Happiness" and "The New Gold Standard"--a revolutionary approach to understanding and mastering the customer experience from Forrester Research.
Over the past several years, leading companies have entered a period of major marketing and operational adjustment and convergence, or intersection. It’s a reaction to a critical fact of life: Customers—not organizations— now control the decision-making dynamics and how organizations are perceived. We are witnessing significant multichannel media application (and resultant omnichannel access by consumers), along with more effective and pervasive customer data gathering, analysis, and modeling. If you’re observing these major shifts in your own organization, you’ll need this book. Inside, you’ll learn how to build proactive customer communication, improve relationships, drive positive brand perception, optimize channel selection and message personalization, and enhance employee-related factors (hiring, training, reward, recognition), all leading to superior customer experience and a customercentric culture. In addition, the author has incorporated content on “Big Data” generation and analytics, which you’ll master while scoring a direct hit to the moving target—your continuously changing, and increasingly independent, customer base.
There have been a number of professional and academic studies, in multiple industries, linking employee attitudes and behaviors with the value customers perceive in their experiences. Through targeted research, and resultant training, communication, process, and reward and recognition programs, what we define as ambassadorship formalizes the direction in which employee engagement has been trending toward for years. Simply, the trend is optimizing employee commitment to the organization and its goals, to the company’s unique value proposition, and to the customer. This is employee ambassadorship, a state beyond satisfaction and engagement where all employees are focused on, and tasked with, delivering customer value as part of their job description, irrespective of location, function or level. There is growing general agreement that both developing employee ambassadors and customer advocates should receive high priority and emphasis if an enterprise is going to be successful. What building ambassadorship does mandate, however, is that having employees focus on the customer will definitely drive more positive experiences and stronger loyalty behavior (for both stakeholder groups). Because antecedent approaches to employee engagement (through research and application) are principally about productivity and alignment, and offer an organization only modest insight about level or degree of customer-centricity, more connection between employee behavior and customer behavior builds focus, effectiveness, and profitability. That is what the content/scope of Employee Ambassadorship will help provide.
Make customer value a C-Suite priority for lasting profits and growth While the Great Recession ravaged the balance sheets of long-standing leaders in their respective industries, many companies have actually gained market share, grown revenuesand profits, and created more value for customers. These are not flash-in-the-pan companies—world-beatersone year and stragglers the next. They are companies like Johnson& Johnson, Procter & Gamble, Fidelity, Cisco, Philips, Walmart, and Amazon. The success of these organizations isn’t the result of a brilliant strategy for bad times; it’sthe outcome of a highly effective long-term strategy that manages thecompany from the outside in. In Strategy from the Outside In, George S. Day and Christine Moormanexplain that the key to such lasting and highly profitable successis the ability to compete on and profit from customer value. It meansoperating from the outside in. It means always building strategy onmarket insight, and ensuring that every part of the company puts customervalue first. Applying years of research, Day andMoorman illustrate that an outside-in view requires constant vigilance and focus on four customer value imperatives: Be a customer value leader Innovate new value for customers Capitalize on the customer as an asset Capitalize on the brand as an asset Day and Moorman take you from theory to practice, with an emphasison real world stories, practical models, and useable metrics sothat you can profit from customer value. From the outside in.
Due to various events, the availability of goods in retail is currently increasingly being restricted with the result that customers cannot find in food retail (FR) the products they wish to purchase because those products are sold out or not availa-ble for delivery. This situation is also termed Out of Stock (OoS). The reasons for the unavailability of products are often problems in connection with orders for goods, as well as the shelf-filling process within a store. According to literature, in those cases where a customer faces an OoS situation, the customer may postpone the purchase, purchase an alternate product, purchase the product in another store or not purchase at all. Depending on the customers reaction, this will result in a sales decline affecting the retailer and /or manufacturer differently. In these cases, customer reactions are influenced by various factors, such as brand loyalty, availa-bility of offered substitute products and many other factors. Within the scope of a survey, it was found that 36% of the customers predominantly reacted with the purchase of an alternate product of another brand to OoS. Also, 29% of the surveyed were willing to visit another store due to OoS.
Struggling to ensure that the customer is at the center of all your business does? This book is your guide to putting the "customer" in customer experience. Not sure what that means? Well, for starters, too many executives believe they are delighting their customers. Why wouldn't they think that?! When they focus on growth, those customer acquisition numbers are pretty sweet, but they don't tell the real story. Prioritizing customer retention is critical. But you can't just throw technology at it, give it some lip service, and call it a day. Retention is hard work! You've got to understand who your customers are and what problems they are trying to solve or what jobs they are trying to do. Then you've got to use that understanding to design an experience that helps customers achieve their goals. That's the key to putting the customer in customer experience! Ultimately, you need to bring the customer voice into all meetings, decisions, processes, and designs. The customer must be at the center of all you do. After all, it's all about the customer! In this book, I cover the three approaches to customer understanding: surveys and data, personas, and journey mapping. I could've written the whole book about journey mapping, but there's so much more to building a customer-centric business than journey mapping. The culture must first be deliberately designed to put the customer at the heart of the business. And all foundational elements of a CX transformation must be in place to make that happen. With that knowledge, read this book and: Learn about the three approaches you must use to understand your customers, why you must use them, and how they work together. Create an action plan to ensure insights gleaned from these three approaches are implemented in your organization. Develop and assign personas to your customers in order to better understand their needs, goals, problems to solve, and jobs to be done. Learn the difference between touchpoint maps and journey maps and how touchpoint maps can still be a valuable asset in your customer experience toolbox. Understand why journey mapping is called the backbone of customer experience management - and how to make it so in your organization. Set up and facilitate your own current-state and future-state journey mapping workshops with customers. Set up and facilitate service blueprint workshops with internal stakeholders. Find out how to put the customer at the heart of your business. And more!
In an era of raging commoditization and eroding profit margins, survival depends on resilience: staying one step ahead of your customers. Sure, most companies say they're "customer-focused," but they don't deliver solutions to customers' thorniest problems. Why? Because they're stymied by the rigid "silos" they're organized around. In Reorganize for Resilience, Ranjay Gulati reveals how resilient companies prosper both in good times and bad, driving growth and increasing profitability by immersing themselves in the lives of their customers. This book shows how resilient organizations cut through internal barriers that impede action, build bridges between warring divisions, and transform former competitors into collaborators. Based on more than a decade of research in a variety of industries, and filled with examples from companies including Cisco Systems, La Farge, Starbucks, Best Buy, and Jones Lang LaSalle, Gulati exploresthe five levers of resilience: · Coordination: Connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses. · Cooperation: Foster a culture that aligns all employees around the shared goals of customer solutions. · Clout: Redistribute power to "bridge builders" and customer champions. · Capability: Develop employees' skills at tackling changing customer needs. · Connection: Blend partners' offerings with yours to provide unique customer solutions.
Customer Experience 3.0 provides firsthand guidance on what works, what doesn't--and the revenue and word-of-mouth payoff of getting it right. Between smartphones, social media, mobile connectivity, and a plethora of other technological innovations changing the way we do almost everything these days, your customers are expecting you to be taking advantage of it all to enhance their customer service experience far beyond the meeting-the-minimum experiences of days past. Unfortunately, many companies are failing to take advantage of and properly manage these service-enhancing tools that now exist, and in return they deliver a series of frustrating, disjointed transactions that end up driving people away and into the pockets of businesses getting it right. Having managed more than 1,000 separate customer service studies, author John A. Goodman has created an innovative customer-experience framework and step-by-step roadmap that shows you how to: Design and deliver flawless services and products while setting honest customer expectations Create and implement an effective customer access strategy Capture and leverage the voice of the customer to set priorities and improve products, services and marketing Use CRM systems, cutting-edge metrics, and other tools to deliver customer satisfaction Companies who get customer service right can regularly provide seamless experiences, seeming to know what customers want even before they know it themselves…while others end up staying generic, take stabs in the dark to try and fix the problem, and end up dropping the ball. Customer Experience 3.0 reveals how to delight customers using all the technological tools at their disposal.
