Make community building your ultimate business growth strategy In Customer Communities: Engage and Retain Customers to Build the Future of Your Business, Nick Mehta and Robin Van Lieshout deliver an actionable playbook on how to cultivate meaningful communities that fuel quantifiable business growth. In the book, you’ll learn how to capitalize on this new growth strategy to scale your company and develop excitement around your products and your firm. The authors outline the 10 foundational Laws of Community, explaining why community development does not need to be expensive and how to integrate community in the heart of your customer journey. You’ll also find: Strategies for creating a cross functional customer engagement team Techniques for building community in places that aren’t the web or on social media Ways to bring your organization’s culture and values into your community with a human-first alignment An essential roadmap to community development for customer success, marketing, support and product teams, and other entrepreneurs, founders, and executive business leaders. Customer Communities will earn a place on the bookshelves of anyone with a stake in organizational growth and resilience.

The Internet is the world's largest marketplace and provides businesses with the ability to interact with their market in a much more direct and tailored way than ever before. Customer.Community takes a new look at online communities as a source of value for both customers and businesses; it shows how to build an online "customer community" that gives customers a reason to stay loyal. Drew Banks and Kim Daus explain exactly what the customer community is and then reveal the tenets that will make it strong: sustainability, size and scalability, social connectivity, and soul. The authors show how to "communitize" commerce, build a solid base of repeat customers, and create value for the customer, and they explain how to manage a site in a cost-effective way. Customer.Community will help cultivate a mind-set to leverage the collective, untapped power of your customer base.

We all live in a service-based economy right now, and the role of customers has changed from passive buyers to active value creators. Customers are actively engaged in the value creation process, and customer value creation behavior has become an essential phenomenon. For the competitive advantage of the firm, employees need to change from exclusive service providers to value facilitators. Firms must now change their paradigm from treating customers as mere buyers to engaging customers as value creators. This book sheds insight into the essentiality of understanding customer value creation behavior for enhancing firm performance. This book is also a comprehensive reference critically analyzing the current state of customer value creation behavior. It covers theoretical foundations, measurement, antecedents and consequences of customer value creation behavior, in addition to applications in specific and various contexts. The book also highlights the importance of understanding the dimensional structure of customer value creation behavior for accurate results of empirical research. In addition, the book also examines customer value destruction behavior or dysfunctional customer behavior. This book challenges the conventional belief that handling customer complaints equates with handling dysfunctional customer behavior and provides useful insights for handling employees and customers.

Your business success is now forever linked to the success of your customers Customer Success is the groundbreaking guide to the exciting new model of customer management. Business relationships are fundamentally changing. In the world B.C. (Before Cloud), companies could focus totally on sales and marketing because customers were often 'stuck' after purchasing. Therefore, all of the 'post-sale' experience was a cost center in most companies. In the world A.B. (After Benioff), with granular per-year, per-month or per-use pricing models, cloud deployments and many competitive options, customers now have the power. As such, B2B vendors must deliver success for their clients to achieve success for their own businesses. Customer success teams are being created in companies to quarterback the customer lifecycle and drive adoption, renewals, up-sell and advocacy. The Customer Success philosophy is invading the boardroom and impacting the way CEOs think about their business. Today, Customer Success is the hottest B2B movement since the advent of the subscription business model, and this book is the one-of-a-kind guide that shows you how to make it work in your company. From the initial planning stages through execution, you'll have expert guidance to help you: Understand the context that led to the start of the Customer Success movement Build a Customer Success strategy proven by the most competitive companies in the world Implement an action plan for structuring the Customer Success organization, tiering your customers, and developing the right cross-functional playbooks Customers want products that help them achieve their own business outcomes. By enabling your customers to realize value in your products, you're protecting recurring revenue and creating a customer for life. Customer Success shows you how to kick start your customer-centric revolution, and make it stick for the long term.

In their efforts to become more customer-focused, companies everywhere find themselves entangled in outmoded systems, metrics, and strategies rooted in their product-centered view of the world. Now, to ease this shift to a customer focus, marketing strategy experts Roland T. Rust, Valarie A. Zeithaml, and Katherine N. Lemon have created a dynamic new model they call "Customer Equity," a strategic framework designed to maximize every firm's most important asset, the total lifetime value of its customer base. The authors' Customer Equity Framework yields powerful insights that will help any business increase the value of its customer base. Rust, Zeithaml, and Lemon introduce the three drivers of customer equity -- Value Equity, Brand Equity, and Retention Equity -- and explain in clear, nontechnical language how managers can base their strategies on one or a combination of these drivers. The authors demonstrate in this breakthrough book how managers can build and employ competitive metrics that reveal their company's Customer Equity relative to their competitors. Based on these metrics, they show how managers can determine which drivers are most important in their industry, how they can make efficient strategic trade-offs between expenditures on these drivers, and how to project a financial return from these expenditures. The final section devotes two chapters to the Customer Pyramid, an approach that segments customers based on their long-term profitability, and an especially important chapter examines the Internet as the ultimate Customer Equity tool. Here the authors show how companies such as Intuit.com, Schwab.com, and Priceline.com have used more than one or all three drivers to increase Customer Equity. In this age of one-to-one marketing, understanding how to drive Customer Equity is central to the success of any firm. In particular, Driving Customer Equity will be essential reading for any marketing manager and, for that matter, any manager concerned with growing the value of the firm's customer base.

Gain practical experience designing and building high-performance, secure, and scalable Salesforce solutions using real-world scenarios. Purchase of the book unlocks access to web-based exam prep resources like flashcards and a free eBook PDF. Key Features Master each knowledge domain by applying key concepts to a real-world scenario Put all the skills covered in the book into action with two full mock scenarios Gain access to additional online assets including flashcards and exam tips Book DescriptionThis book is a complete guide to learning essential architectural concepts that’ll enable you to deliver secure, high-performant Salesforce solutions and pass the Salesforce CTA review board exam with confidence. This second edition comes with updated content, additional supporting material such as cheat sheets, and detailed practical examples, and helps you learn key soft skills to craft a winning presentation. You’ll begin by reviewing vital architectural concepts needed to create a scalable end-to-end Salesforce solution. Next, you’ll find out how to identify requirements and break down a problem into smaller, more solvable parts. As you advance, you’ll gain practical experience in managing design decisions and defending them using real-world scenarios. The book also helps familiarize you with the correct methodology to structure your solution presentation and the necessary supporting artifacts. Finally, you’ll practice providing solutions for two full hypothetical scenarios and structuring your playback step by step. By the end of this Salesforce book, you’ll be able to design a highly scalable Salesforce solution and create suitable material to comfortably explain the end-to-end solution to the CTA review board and potentially your customer, and have a higher chance of passing.What you will learn Explore core architectural concepts essential for any Salesforce architect Understand Salesforce knowledge domains using practical examples Practice creating solutions using scenarios focusing on particular knowledge domains Discover key artifacts needed to document and explain an end-to-end solution Apply data life cycle management effectively in the Salesforce ecosystem Design appropriate enterprise integration interfaces to build your connected solution Know what to expect on the day of the review board along with valuable tips and tricks Who this book is for This book is for Salesforce architects who want to design secure, performant, and scalable technical solutions for their organizations and ultimately become Salesforce Certified Technical Architects. A solid understanding of the Salesforce platform is required, ideally combined with three to five years of practical experience as an application architect, system architect, enterprise architect, or solution architect.

Philipp Wiegandt empirically analyzes the effects the creation of a firm-established brand community has on the brand loyalty and word-of-mouth communication of its members over time. He finds that establishing a firm-established brand community creates value for both – the company and their customers.