16 Best Books on Customer Experience

Service design is the activity of utilizing resources and people to build and sustain services that not only meet customers’ needs, but also add that little bit of magic or true competitive advantage. In an overcrowded marketplace there is often little opportunity to break away from the pack and influence customer perceptions; Customer-Driven Transformation demonstrates how to use design thinking as a driver for organizational change to translate your vision into compelling services that will delight your customers. How did companies like Netflix, Airbnb and Uber revolutionize industries and win loyal followers? They started here. By thinking about what customers need foremost, you can reinvent your value proposition and deliver services that work.

Customer-Driven Transformation shows how to instill an outside-in approach to strategy, moving away from management that’s technology, marketing or resource optimization-led, towards being customer-inspired and experimental with innovation. It is a practical guide for any business to lead a transformational programme and use design thinking to change how services are created, ensuring they are expertly designed, elegant in use and advance in customer-mindedness.

With ground-breaking case studies from the likes of E.On Energy, Hyundai Motor Company and Bupa, this cutting-edge book will empower companies to take control of customer experience and deliver long-lasting and impactful change. Focusing on one of the hottest management topics, it is an inspiring read for any business leader to understand how to reinvent their value proposition, gain market share and win customers.

Stand aside, we’re coming through!

That’s the cry of a new generation of technology vendors. They have a new approach to enabling success for their customers. And they’re thriving as a result.

These vendors all have subscription pricing at the heart of their business. Each has learned that if customers don’t feel they’ve had success, recurring revenue doesn’t grow and may even decline.

What makes them different? They have absolute clarity about what the customer considers success to be. And they’ve built their business around enabling that success. They know it’s the outcomes for the customer that count. They’re all members of the Outcome Generation.

This book shows how to join the Outcome Generation. You’ll learn how to leverage true customer success at every stage of the customer lifecycle. For existing customers, you’ll learn how to engage customer executives at the start of the buying cycle–and often create a buying cycle.

You’ll learn how to increase new business (new logo) sales by employing the third generation of technology sales–selling outcomes. And exactly what type of outcome to sell. Using the third-generation approach, you’ll create greater emotional connections, differentiate from the competition and win more business.

You’ll also learn how to evolve Services and Support to focus on enabling true customer success, and how that’s producing great references.

And Marketing will have a whole new way of attracting attention, creating interest and engaging prospects.

Most vendors have evolved past solution-selling and its approaches to marketing, sales, services and support. The Outcome Generation shows how to align the whole business around a common theme–enabling outcomes the customers regard as success. And why that allows vendors to thrive! Buy the book now and join the Outcome Generation.

In Why Customers Leave, popular customer experience and marketing speaker David Avrin makes a compelling case for customer experience as a bankable differentiator in an era of vast marketplace choices. The book lays out the very visible reasons for the recent shift in customer mindset and expectation, illustrates the myriad ways that companies inadvertently drive customers and prospects to competitors, and offers a multitude of creative strategies and tactics to attract and retain new prospects.

In the book, David explores and articulates the disturbing new dynamic that has arisen from easy-to-find, one-click-away, at-your-fingertips options: “We have become a world of impatient, intolerant and demanding customers, and we move on quickly if inconvenienced in any way. Don’t blame the millennials! We have seen the enemy, and it is all of us.”

Welcome to a new era of business in which your brand is defined by those who experience it.

Do you know how your customers experience your brand today?

Do you know how they really feel?

Do you know what they say when you re not around?

In an always-on world where everyone is connected to information and also one another, customer experience is your brand. And, without defining experiences, brands become victim to whatever people feel and share.

In his new book X: The Experience When Business Meets Design bestselling author Brian Solis shares why great products are no longer good enough to win with customers and why creative marketing and delightful customer service too are not enough to succeed. In X, he shares why the future of business is experiential and how to create and cultivate meaningful experiences.

This isn’t your ordinary business book. The idea of a book was re-imagined for a digital meets analog world to be a relevant and sensational experience. Its aesthetic was meant to evoke emotion while also giving new perspective and insights to help you win the hearts and minds of your customers. And, the design of this book, along with what fills its pages, was done using the principles shared within.

Brian shares more than the importance of experience. You’ll learn how to design a desired, meaningful and uniform experience in every moment of truth in a fun way including:

• How our own experience gets in the way of designing for people not like us
• Why empathy and new perspective unlock creativity and innovation
• The importance of User Experience (UX) in real life and in executive thinking
• The humanity of Human-Centered Design in all you do
• The art of Hollywood storytelling from marketing to product design to packaging
• Apple’s holistic approach to experience architecture
• The value of different journey and experience mapping approaches

The future of business lies in experience architecture and you are the architect.

Business, meet design.

X

In this updated edition of Dare to Serve, former Popeyes CEO Cheryl Bachelder shows that leading by serving is a rigorous and tough-minded approach that yields the best results.

When she was named CEO of Popeyes in 2007, the stock price had slipped from $34 in 2002 to $13. The brand was stagnant, the team was discouraged, and the franchisees were just plain angry. Nine years later, restaurant sales were up 45 percent, restaurant profits had doubled, and the stock price was over $61. Servant leadership is sometimes derided as soft or ineffective, but this book confirms that challenging people to reach a daring destination, while treating them with dignity, creates the conditions for superior performance.

The second edition of this bestselling book includes Bachelder’s post-Popeyes observations and new examples of how you can switch your leadership from self to serve. Ever engaging and inspirational, Bachelder takes you firsthand through the transformation of Popeyes and shows how anyone, at any level can become a Dare-to-Serve leader.

With a constant stream of new communication channels emerging, the real challenge for marketers is not just making sure their brand is present in each space but staying true to their brand purpose. 

A follow-up to Bold, the best-selling book which looked at what made cutting edge brands stand out, On Purpose, goes one step further and provides practical advice on how to achieve those same results successfully, over multiple channels.  Shaun Smith and Andy Milligan provide a framework for success, explaining how to:
–Stand Up: be clear about brand purpose and promise
–Stand Out: define, design and deliver distinctive customer experiences across multiple channels
–Stand Firm: create strong cultures that sustain results

They explain and define how to deliver “on purpose” experiences by using a case study, individual thought pieces by experts in the field, and a key action summary at the end of each chapter.

Rethink your business model to incorporate the power of “user” experiences.

What’s the Future of Business? will galvanize a new movement that aligns the tenets of user experience with the vision of innovative leadership to improve business performance, engagement, and relationships for a new generation of consumerism. It provides an overview of real-world experiences versus “user” experiences in relation to products, services, mobile, social media, and commerce, among others. This book explains why experience is everything and how the future of business will come down to shared experiences.

• Aligns the tenets of user experience with the concepts of innovative leadership to improve business performance and engagement and to motivate readers to rethink business models and customer and employee relationships
• Motivates readers to rethink business models, products and services, marketing, and customer and employee relationships with desired experiences in mind
• Brian Solis is globally recognized as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media, and is the author of Engage! and The End of Business as Usual!

Discover how user experience design affects your business, and how you can harness its power for meaningful revenue growth

Position your organisation’s culture to attain new heights.

Above the Line: How to Create a Company Culture that Engages Employees, Delights Customers and Delivers Results offers all leaders a handbook for leveraging an organisation’s culture to engage staff, increase customer satisfaction and streamline business performance. A groundbreaking work, this book reveals what it takes to achieve optimum results from your organisational culture without employing the use of external consultants. This organic, in-house approach to company culture transformation saves both time and money. Step-by-step, author Michael Henderson illustrates how to create a culture in which employees and leaders delight those outside the company―customers, shareholder, employees’ families, suppliers and the board of directors―and anyone else who may benefit from an association with the organisation.

The book’s proven models and ideas have been tried and tested with a broad range of of high-profile international companies. Expert author, Michael Henderson, a.k.a. The Corporate Anthropologist, has more than 30 years’ experience, and a proven track record of working and consulting with organisations to enhance their workplace cultures.

• Reveals how to create an organisational culture that achieves desired results
• Puts the cultural transformation process in the hands of the people directly effected
• Smashes some of the established and costly myths about culture and how to work with culture

This important resource is written for leaders, managers and supervisors at all levels and across industries.

In Customer Experience Management, renowned consultant and marketing thinker Bernd Schmitt follows up on his groundbreaking book Experiential Marketing by introducing a new and visionary approach to marketing called customer experience management (CEM). In this book, Schmitt demonstrates how to put his CEM framework to work in any organization to spur growth, increase revenues, and transform the image of your company and its brands. From retail buying to telephone orders, from marketing communications to online shopping, every customer touch-point offers companies an opportunity to maximize the customer experience and establish a bond that will never be broken.

Customer Experience Management introduces the five-step CEM process, a comprehensive tool for connecting with customers at every touch-point. This revolutionary marketing guide provides cases of successful CEM implementations in a wide variety of consumer and B2B industries, including pharmaceuticals, electronics, beauty and cosmetics, telecommunications, beverages, financial services, and even the nonprofit sector.

A must-read for senior executives, marketing managers, and anyone who wants to drive growth, increase income, and spur organizational change, Customer Experience Management demonstrates the power of collecting truly relevant customer information, developing and implementing winning strategies, and measuring their results.

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE SUCCESS!

You already know the Starbucks story. Since 1992, its stock has risen a staggering 5,000 percent! The genius of Starbucks success lies in its ability to create personalized customer experiences, stimulate business growth, generate profits, energize employees, and secure customer loyalty-all at the same time.

The Starbucks Experience contains a robust blend of home-brewed ingenuity and people-driven philosophies that have made Starbucks one of the world’s “most admired” companies, according to Fortune magazine. With unique access to Starbucks personnel and resources, Joseph Michelli discovered that the success of Starbucks is driven by the people who work there-the “partners”-and the special experience they create for each customer. Michelli reveals how you can follow the Starbucks way to

• Reach out to entire communities
• Listen to individual workers and consumers
• Seize growth opportunities in every market
• Custom-design a truly satisfying experience that benefits everyone

involved

Filled with real-life insider stories, eye-opening anecdotes, and solid step-by-step strategies, this fascinating book takes you deep inside one of the most talked-about companies in the world today.

For anyone who wants to learn from the best-and be the best-The Starbucks Experience is a rich, heady brew of unforgettable user-friendly ideas.

In a world where consumers have access to an abundance of free information about purchase alternatives, business managers must adapt to a startling new reality. What businesses and investors must realize, says Fornell, is that customers know something that Wall Street has yet to figure out. The Satisfied Customer makes the case that global market forces are all pointing towards one inevitable truth: the cost of poor service will soon be borne by the companies that serve it – not the customers that receive it.

The Satisfied Customer prepares managers and investors for a major shift in economic power that will change how capital moves, how corporate assets are managed, and ultimately, how business is done. This book describes how companies that underestimate the newly-empowered customer are punished by product and equity markets alike, and offers practical advice on how to prosper when buyers are kings and investment capital fuels their power.

The implications of the newly-empowered buyer turn much of conventional business practice on its head. The Satisfied Customer explains how superior financial returns can go hand-in-hand with reduced risk; why customer satisfaction should not be maximized, but customer complaints should; why exceeding customer expectations is a bad idea; why getting too close to customers should be avoided, how customer loyalty can sometimes be too costly, and why high productivity is not always a good thing.

According to the New York Times, Claes Fornell’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is the definitive benchmark for how consumers feel about the products they buy. The Satisfied Customer draws from the ACSI database and CFI Group cases, including examples from Amazon.com, American Airlines, Apple, AT&T, Best Buy, Chrysler, Circuit City, Comcast, Costco, Charter Communications, Dell, Double Tree Club Hotel, eBay, Electrolux, Florida Marlins, Ford, Gateway, Google, Haier, H&R Block, Hyundai, KLM, Kmart, McDonald’s, Northwest Airlines, Microsoft, Southwest Airlines, Sprint Nextel, the Swedish Postal Service, Time Warner, Toyota, Trader Joe’s, Volvo, Whole Foods, and many others, to reveal the winners and losers in the battle for buyer preference.

Good, bad, or indifferent, every customer has an experience with your company and the products or services you provide. But few businesses really manage that customer experience, so they lose the chance to transform customers into lifetime customers.  In this book, Lou Carbone shows exactly how to engineer world-class customer experiences, one clue at a time.

Carbone draws on the latest neuroscientific research to show how customers transform physical and emotional sensations into powerful perceptions of your business… perceptions that crystallize into attitudes that dictate everything from satisfaction to loyalty. And he explains how to assess and audit existing customer experiences, design and implement new ones… and “steward” them over time, to ensure that they remain outstanding, no matter how your customers change.

“Dream, Believe, Dare, Do . . .”

Though four simple words, this carefully crafted credo lies at the heart of Walt Disney’s enviable empire and has led The Walt Disney Company to prosperity for decades.

As foremost experts on Disney, authors Bill Capodagli and Lynn Jackson return with an updated and expanded third edition of The Disney Way to show how organizations can incorporate this four-pillared credo to support any business, drive any team, and guide any leader to create immeasurable success.

Profiling a new set of diverse organizations―such as TYRA Beauty, Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, Ottawa County, Michigan, and Science Center of Iowa―the authors show how companies of any size, whether an entrepreneurial startup or a Fortune 500, can reach their utmost potential by embracing Walt Disney’s techniques to create a consumer-centric culture. They provide step-by-step actions on how to:

• Give every member of your organization a chance to dream
• Stand firm on your beliefs and principles
• Treat your customers like guests
• Support, enable, and reward employees
• Build long-term relationships
• Dare to take calculated risks
• Train extensively and constantly
• Align long-term vision with short-term execution
• Utilize storyboarding techniques
• Pay close attention to details
• Demonstrate “love” for product, employees, customers, and self

Find out why Walt Disney’s Dream, Believe, Dare, Do principles continue to redefine the nature of business and revolutionize the art of management, while learning how to implement them in your own organization.