"The Real-Time Contact Center" is a practical guide to building a service infrastructure that will simultaneously exceed customers' expectations and build revenues.

In Intergenerational Contact Zones, Kaplan, Thang, Sánchez, and Hoffman introduce novel ways of thinking, planning, and designing intergenerationally enriched environments. Filled with vivid examples of how ICZs breathe new life into communities and social practices, this important volume focuses on practical descriptions of ways in which practitioners and researchers could translate and infuse the notion of ICZ into their work. The ICZ concept embraces generation and regeneration of community life, parks and recreational locations, educational environments, residential settings and family life, and national and international contexts for social development. With its focus on creating effective and meaningful intergenerational settings, it offers a rich how-to toolkit to help professionals and user groups as they begin to consider ways to develop, activate, and nurture intergenerational spaces. Intergenerational Contact Zones will be essential reading for academics and researchers interested in human development, aging, and society, as well as practitioners, educators, and policy makers interested in intergenerational gathering places from an international perspective.

If you’re striving to make products and services that your customers will love, then you’ll need a customer-driven organization. As companies transform their businesses to meet the demands of the digital age, they find themselves grappling with uniquely human challenges. Organizational knowledge becomes siloed, employees move to safeguard their expertise, and customer data creates polarization and infighting between teams. All of these challenges widen the distance between the people who make your products and the customers who use them. To meet today’s challenges, companies need to do more than build processes for customer-driven products. They need to create a customer-driven culture. With the help of his friend and mentor Monty Hammontree, Travis Lowdermilk takes readers through the cultural transformation of the Developer Division at Microsoft. This book shows readers how to "hack" their culture and reduce the distance between them and their customers’ needs. It’s a uniquely personal story that’s told amidst a cultural revolution at one of the largest software companies in the world. This story acts as your guide. You’ll learn how to: Establish a Common Language: Help employees change their thinking and actions Build Bridges, Not Walls: Treat product building as a team sport Encourage Learning Versus Knowing: Help your team understand their customers Build Leaders That Build Your Culture: Showcase star employees to inspire others Meet Teams Where They Are: Make it easy for teams to to adopt vital behavior changes Make Data Relatable: Move beyond numbers and focus on empathizing with customers

As customer orientation continues to gain importance in the marketing field, there has been a growing concern for organizations to implement effective customer centric policies. Customer-Centric Marketing Strategies: Tools for Building Organizational Performance provides a more conceptual understanding on customer-centric marketing strategies as well as revealing the success factors of these concepts. This book will discuss how to improve the organization’s financial and marketing performance.

Digital transformation is shaping a new landscape for businesses and their customers. For marketing professionals, advancing technology (artificial intelligence, robots, chatbots, etc.) and the explosion of personal data available present great opportunities to offer customers experiences that are ever richer, more fluid and more connected. For customers, this ecosystem is synonymous with new roles. They are more autonomous and have power alongside the company: they influence, innovate, punish and more. These developments push companies to implement new customer strategies. It is in this context, marked by pitfalls and paradoxes, that the authors of this book reflect on the customer relationship, what it has become and what it will be tomorrow. The book provides practitioners, teacher-researchers and Master's students with a state of the art and a prospective vision of customer relations in a digital world. It is aimed at those who want to gain an up-to-date understanding of the field and find all the keys needed to project themselves into the future.

Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost? This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency. In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies. Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you: Reshape your connections with your customers Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity Create the right revenue model Make the best technology choices to support your strategy Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.