We are in the age of the empowered customer. There are more and more customer choices, greater and greater demands on organizations. Your Customers want to contact you utilizing an ever-growing number of channels, but still expect a continual and contextual conversation with you throughout their journey. The expectations from your customer is no longer to just resolve their issues on the first try, but instead to anticipate their next need. The stakes for customer facing organizations are getting higher and higher. Fortunately, there are more opportunities today to delight customers than at any time in history. In my book, I make the case that customer experience is not just a differentiator – it is the reason your organization exists. Profits and long-term growth are by-products of delighting customers. Whether you support customers through a call center or you are an army of one you will learn how to create an environment that is intentional about delighting customers. We will explore the three vital components to achieve this – liberating structures, data driven technology and empowered people. The Curated Experience: Engineering Customer Service to Build Loyalty teaches us that it is about intentionally crafting a better Customer Experience.

Imagine what would happen if you spent 0.1% of your time adding value to the other 99.9%. Picture an environment where your experiences don't just happen to you, but are used to make big things happen for you. Could you harness an otherwise overwhelming world of endless information, gratifying moments, and dizzying possibilities? How much social currency could you create if you knew how to capture, organize, and share anything to improve everything? The open secret is that curating your entire existence - or Experience Curating as rising author Joel Zaslofsky calls it - is just as powerful today as it was 2,000 years ago. Experience Curating isn't just about Zaslofsky's unique FAOCAS framework and how to reap its rewards with your favorite tools. It's a three-part blueprint to achieve your own brand of success, complete with real-world case studies from Evernote, The Huffington Post, and even the Brothers Grimm.

An award-winning scholar and teacher explores how Shakespeare's greatest characters were built on a learned sense of empathy While exploring Shakespeare's plays with her students, Paula Marantz Cohen discovered that teaching and discussing his plays unlocked a surprising sense of compassion in the classroom. In this short and illuminating book, she shows how Shakespeare's genius lay with his ability to arouse empathy, even when his characters exist in alien contexts and behave in reprehensible ways. Cohen takes her readers through a selection of Shakespeare's most famous plays, including Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and The Merchant of Venice, to demonstrate the ways in which Shakespeare thought deeply and clearly about how we treat "the other." Cohen argues that only through close reading of Shakespeare can we fully appreciate his empathetic response to race, class, gender, and age. Wise, eloquent, and thoughtful, this book is a forceful argument for literature's power to champion what is best in us.

A book that produces sensory experiences while bringing the concept of experience itself into relief as a subject of criticism and an object of contemplation. Experience offers a reading experience like no other. A heat-sensitive cover by Olafur Eliasson reveals words, colors, and a drawing when touched by human hands. Endpapers designed by Carsten Höller are printed in ink containing carefully calibrated quantities of the synthesized human pheromones estratetraenol and androstadienone, evoking the suggestibility of human desire. The margins and edges of the book are designed by Tauba Auerbach in complementary colors that create a dynamically shifting effect when the book is shifted or closed. When the book is opened, bookmarks cascade from the center, emerging from spider web prints by Tomás Saraceno. Experience produces experience while bringing the concept itself into relief as an object of contemplation. The sensory experience of the book as a physical object resonates with the intellectual experience of the book as a container of ideas. Experience convenes a conversation with artists, musicians, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, and neuroscientists, each of whom explores aspects of sensorial and cultural realms of experience. The texts include new essays written for this volume and classic texts by such figures as William James and Michel Foucault. The first publication from MIT's Center for Art, Science, & Technology, Experience approaches its subject through multiple modes. Publication design by Kimberly Varella with Becca Lofchie, Content Object Design Studio. Cover concept by Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Kimberly Varella (Content Object). Contributors Tauba Auerbach, Bevil Conway, John Dewey, Olafur Eliasson, Michel Foucault, Adam Frank, Vittorio Gallese, Renée Green, Stefan Helmreich, Carsten Höller, Edmund Husserl, William James, Caroline A. Jones, Douglas Kahn, Brian Kane, Leah Kelly, Bruno Latour, Alvin Lucier, David Mather, Mara Mills, Alva Noë, Jacques Rancière, Michael Rossi, Tomás Saraceno, Natasha Schüll, Joan W.Scott, Tino Sehgal, Alma Steingart, Josh Tenenbaum, Rebecca Uchill

The Problem with Parenting serves as an essential guide to the recent origins and current excesses of American parenting for students, parents, and policy makers interested in the changing role of the family in childrearing. Family scholarship focuses predominately on the evolution of family structure and function, with only passing references to parenting. Researchers who study parenting, however, invariably regard it as a sociological phenomenon with complex motivations rooted in such factors as class, economic instability, and new technologies. This book examines the relationship between changes to the family and the emergence of parenting, defined here as a specific mode of childrearing. It shows how, beginning in the 1970s, the family was transformed from a social unit that functioned as the primary institution for raising children into a vehicle for the nurturing and fulfillment of the self. The book pays special attention to socialization and describes how the change in our understanding of parenthood—from a state of being into the distinct activity of "parenting"—is indicative of a disruption of our ability to transfer key cultural values and norms from one generation to the next.

Pairing "big ideas" in marketing with the popular activity of content curation, The Rise of the Curator Class positions curation as a "humanization" movement that is restructuring the internet. Curation is set to overturn the $2.2 trillion global creative industry, revolutionizing how we create, market, and discover content. In the era of content overload and fake news, in which everything to buy, listen to, read, or watch is available online, there is one group of people who have learned to thrive in this climate of superabundance: the curator class, whose influence and power grows as more people look to them as guides. This new curator class is rewriting traditional curation, tackling the overload and making sense of it for others. In the past, curation was available to an elite few. Now, internet platforms such as Pinterest, Spotify, and Twitter empower hundreds of millions of people to curate their ideas for anyone who may be interested, revolutionizing how content is marketed and sold. The Rise of the Curator Class explains how curation is disrupting internet commerce as consumer trust moves farther away from traditional brands and closer to the curators who lead tastes, and it equips readers to think critically about how curation can work for them.

What is a luxury customer experience and how can luxury brands best use emerging technologies in order to create truly unique, high-end experiences for their customers? These are the questions that The Future of Luxury Customer Experience has been designed to answer, as it explores how luxury brands can best utilize human touch and new technologies to deliver experiences that surprise and delight customers in a truly omnichannel environment. Using case studies from world-leading luxury retailers such as Ferrar, Cartier, Audemars Piguet, Mandarin Oriental, Valentino, Bottega Veneta and many others, this book explains what makes a luxury customer experience different. Learn how luxury brands need to evolve in order to adapt to the changing landscape, using data and the latest technology to provide exceptional customer experiences whilst protecting their customer's privacy. Written by experts from the world-leading SDA Bocconi School of Management, this book provides a thorough understanding of how to create and deliver luxury customer experiences that will build long-lasting customer loyalty, as well as how these experiences can build and support brand awareness. Covering topics such as arts and culture, authenticity, inclusivity and social responsibility, the use of AI and virtual experiences, as well as how to set KPIs to evaluate success, this book provides practical advice on how to create a luxury customer experience that will deliver exceptional results.