Customers Inside Customers Outside

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.

For readers of "Delivering Happiness" and "The New Gold Standard"--a revolutionary approach to understanding and mastering the customer experience from Forrester Research.

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.

In an era of raging commoditization and eroding profit margins, survival depends on resilience: staying one step ahead of your customers. Sure, most companies say they're "customer-focused," but they don't deliver solutions to customers' thorniest problems. Why? Because they're stymied by the rigid "silos" they're organized around. In Reorganize for Resilience, Ranjay Gulati reveals how resilient companies prosper both in good times and bad, driving growth and increasing profitability by immersing themselves in the lives of their customers. This book shows how resilient organizations cut through internal barriers that impede action, build bridges between warring divisions, and transform former competitors into collaborators. Based on more than a decade of research in a variety of industries, and filled with examples from companies including Cisco Systems, La Farge, Starbucks, Best Buy, and Jones Lang LaSalle, Gulati exploresthe five levers of resilience: · Coordination: Connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses. · Cooperation: Foster a culture that aligns all employees around the shared goals of customer solutions. · Clout: Redistribute power to "bridge builders" and customer champions. · Capability: Develop employees' skills at tackling changing customer needs. · Connection: Blend partners' offerings with yours to provide unique customer solutions.

Outlines the skills and techniques of providing superior customer service.