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.