Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

The solution in each case was a focus on customer experience, the most powerful - and misunderstood - element of corporate strategy today. Customer experience is, quite simply, how your customers perceive their every interaction with your company. It's a fundamental business driver. Here's proof: over a recent five-year period during which the S&P 500 was flat, a stock portfolio of customer experience leaders grew 22 percent. In an age when customers have access to vast amounts of data about your company and its competitors, customer experience is the only sustainable source of competitive advantage. But how to excel at it?

Based on 14 years of research by the customer experience leaders at Forrester Research, Outside In offers a complete road map to attaining the experience advantage. It starts with the framework of the customer experience ecosystem, which reveals that the roots of customer experience problems lie not just with customer-facing employees like your sales staff, but with behind-the-scenes employees like accountants, lawyers, and programmers, as well as with the policies, processes, and technologies that your employees use every day. Identifying and solving these problems has the potential to dramatically increase sales and decrease costs.

Outside In will teach you how to master the six disciplines of customer experience: Strategy, Customer Understanding, Design, Measurement, Governance, and Culture. You'll see how Holiday Inn's customer experience strategy led to a complete redesign of its lobbies and restaurants and how American Express reinvented its service culture, earning loyalty by providing a better experience. You'll discover how Boeing redesigned the way it delivers information to match the needs of distinct customer types. And you'll learn how Barclaycard U.S. assigns every major element of customer experience to a senior executive with the power to bulldoze internal roadblocks and solve customer problems that inhibit growth. Your gut already tells you that customer experience is the key to business success. Now you can prove it. And with the rigorous, battle-tested tools in this audiobook, you can tap the transformative power of managing from the outside in.

©2012 Harley Manning, Kerry Bodine (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.