Differentiate your business by sharpening your Customer Focus or risk giving your competitors a competitive advantage.The-best-of-the-best do this. They know that the only long-term strategy that effectively creates customer loyalty, long-term profitability and which strengthens both internal service performance and productivity is a Customer-Focused strategy.This outstanding book explains what it takes to become truly Customer-Focused. It provides detailed, step-by-step instructions on what you need to do to create customer focus throughout your entire organization. We describe in detail, 12 proven 'best practices' strategies which you can learn from and use to create your own customer focus strategy and implementation plan. This book contains over 200 pages of detailed explanations, real world examples, stories and case studies as well as exercises and worksheets which have been designed to help you achieve greater customer focus in your organization, company, department or team.

Not all customers are created equal. Despite what the tired old adage says, the customer is not always right. Not all customers deserve your best efforts: in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers...and then there is pretty much everybody else. Upending some of our most fundamental beliefs, renowned behavioral data expert Peter Fader, Co-Director of The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, helps businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. He provides insights to help you revamp your performance metrics, product development, customer relationship management and organization in order to make sure you focus directly on the needs of your most valuable customers and increase profits for the long term.

Customer loyalty is essential to the long term financial success of your business, but with more choice then ever before, customers today have high expectations of the products and services they use. To continue to meet - and even to exceed - these high expectations, you need a top notch customer services system in place, and Customer Care Excellence will enable you to achieve just that. In clear, practical language, this book takes you through how you can develop and sustain a customer-service focus within your company. Emphasizing both strategic and practical aspects of customer care, Customer Care Excellence explains how gaining customer commitment and motivating employees to deliver an excellent service at all your company's touch points can ensure successful results and satisfied customers. This fully revised and updated edition includes new material examining the impact of social networking on customer behaviour and the emotional connection customers have with the brand, explaining how you can create a memorable customer experience. Author Sarah Cook takes you through the practical steps necessary to create a culture of customer focus and, crucially, shows how employee engagement leads to customer engagement.

Strong customer-focused companies have a clear, relevant promise which they obsessively deliver day-in, day-out. At the same time, they relentlessly drive the market by evolving the offer in the face of market developments and opportunities. Because they meet customer needs better than the competition, again and again, they are able to generate sustainable, profitable, market-leading organic growth. The problem the book addresses is how to achieve this. The authors identify five key steps using their framework for success: Offer a clear, relevant customer promise Build customer trust by reliably delivering that promise Continuously improve the promise, while still reliably delivering it Drive the market by innovating beyond the familiar Support all this with an open organization that promotes frank discussion based on clear facts and market feedback. Above all the book runs counter to the fashionable claim that the starting-point for business success should be to find a 'blue-sky', 'out-of-the-box' breakthrough innovation. Barwise and Meehan use many compelling cases to illustrate how managers can find ways within their existing network and organization to achieve long term growth.

In order to be successful, companies need to listen and respond to customers' needs and expectations. This helps companies to find out what customers really want from them and what they really think of their services. It also helps them to keep existing customers and attract new ones.There are five main ways of getting feedback from customers. You can simply observe your customers' behavior, hold a focus group, or conduct a survey. You can also use your salespeople and customer service teams to glean feedback from customers. The Web, e-mail, and social networking allow you to gather feedback from customers in any location. Each provide their own types of data, and companies should choose which ones suit them best.There are four main steps involved in exploring customer needs. First you need to gather information about the customers' current situation. You then try to discover their desired situation. You also need to investigate any past experiences they may have had with products similar to yours and finally you carry out a gap analysis.Companies need to manage customer expectations in order to try and provide the final outcome they expect. Customers expect a collaborative relationship, choice, and good value. They also expect prompt response and dispute resolution, a feeling of importance, transparency, two-way communication, and relevant marketing campaigns.CRM systems help you to efficiently manage your customers' expectations. There are different strategies for this that ensure that the needs of your customers are met quickly and completely. CRM also helps you to provide effective, efficient processes and put your customer at the center of the organization. Finally CRM provides end-to-end connectivity that links the organization with its internal and external customers and its suppliers.Every organization that wants to move to being more customer focused should have a strategy in place. This customer-focused strategy is built around three key decisions.The appropriate scale and scope of your strategy is the first crucial decision. This refers to the elements that need to be involved in your organization's customer focus solution.Next, you must decide the level of integration between these elements. Finally, you need to make the decision whether to create a low, moderate, or high level of customer focus.When designing your strategy, taken into account the relevant operational strategies for becoming more customer focused that already exist, including Six Sigma and customer relationship management (CRM).

Thinkers50 Top 10 Best New Management Books for 2022 A distinguished Harvard Business School professor offers a compelling reassessment and defense of purpose as a management ethos, documenting the vast performance gains and social benefits that become possible when firms manage to get purpose right. Few business topics have aroused more skepticism in recent years than the notion of corporate purpose, and for good reason. Too many companies deploy purpose, or a reason for being, as a promotional vehicle to make themselves feel virtuous and to look good to the outside world. Some have only foggy ideas about what purpose is and conflate it with strategy and other concepts like “mission,” “vision,” and “values.” Even well-intentioned leaders don’t understand purpose’s full potential and engage half-heartedly and superficially with it. Outsiders spot this and become cynical about companies and the broader capitalist endeavor. Having conducted extensive field research, Ranjay Gulati reveals the fatal mistakes leaders unwittingly make when attempting to implement a reason for being. Moreover, he shows how companies can embed purpose much more deeply than they currently do, delivering impressive performance benefits that reward customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, and communities alike. To get purpose right, leaders must fundamentally change not only how they execute it but also how they conceive of and relate to it. They must practice what Gulati calls deep purpose, furthering each organization’s reason for being more intensely, thoughtfully, and comprehensively than ever before. In this authoritative, accessible, and inspiring guide, Gulati takes readers inside some of the world’s most purposeful companies to understand the secrets to their successes. He explores how leaders can pursue purpose more deeply by navigating the inevitable tradeoffs more deliberately and effectively to balance between short- and long-term value; building purpose more systematically into every key organizational function to mobilize stakeholders and enhance performance; updating organizations to foster more autonomy and collaboration, which in turn allow individual employees to work more purposefully; using powerful storytelling to communicate a reason for being, arousing emotions and building a community of inspired and committed stakeholders; and building cultures that don’t merely support purpose, but also allow employees to link the corporate purpose to their own personal reasons for being. As Gulati argues, a deeper engagement with purpose holds the key not merely to the well-being of individual companies but also to humanity’s future. With capitalism under siege and relatively low levels of trust in business, purpose can serve as a radically new operating system for the enterprise, enhancing performance while also delivering meaningful benefits to society. It’s the kind of inspired thinking that businesses—and the rest of us—urgently need.

Visits to customers by a cross-functional team of marketers and engineers play an important role in new product development, entry into new markets, and in exploring customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The new edition of this widely used professional resource provides step-by-step instructions for making effective use of this market research technique. Using a wealth of specific examples, Edward F. McQuarrie explains how to set feasible objectives and how to select the right number of the right kind of customers to visit. One of the leading experts in the field, McQuarrie demonstrates how to construct a discussion guide and how to devise good questions, and offers practical advice on how to conduct face-to-face interviews. Extensively updated throughout, this third edition includes three new chapters as well as expanded coverage of the analysis of visit data. It also discusses which industries and product categories are most (and least) suitable to the customer visit technique. The author also covers how the customer visit technique compares to other market research techniques such as focus groups.