By Randy Ksar, Social Strategist & CX Champion, Uniphore
Customers are often frustrated by organizations who they feel fail to listen to their concerns and deliver poor experiences and customer service. More than ever, a good customer experience (CX) is crucial to meeting the needs and demands of the modern customer.
We’ve compiled five of the best customer experience books of 2021. These books offer leading insight and practical examples of how to humanize the customer experience and improve customer retention.
This list of books has been compiled through recommendations from business leaders in the CX space. So if customer experience management is an area your business wants to improve on, then these books are well worth a read.
The Guaranteed Customer Experience
by Jeff Toister
Recommended by Nate Brown, Founder of the CX Accelerator and CXO of Officium Labs
Jeff Toister’s informative book advises how to deliver an amazing customer experience every time. It explores the concept of an experience guarantee that never falls short of customer expectations. This includes advice on what motivates customers to buy from businesses, how to earn customer trust and how to avoid service failures that result in customer churn.
You’ll also explore actual examples of how leading organizations have used experience guarantees to gain a competitive advantage, grow their businesses and win and retain customers.
Leading the Customer Experience
by Brad Cleveland
Recommended by Jenny Dempsey, CX Manager at Apeel Sciences
Brad Cleveland provides a practical approach to increasing customer loyalty and delivering outstanding business results. His book offers insight into how businesses in the B2B and B2C spaces, as well as the private and public sectors, can better understand and improve their customer experience offering.
For example, technologies like artificial intelligence and mobile have a significant effect on customer experience. Organizations that struggle to use these technologies to drive product and service innovation will be left behind and risk brand damage, customer dissatisfaction and higher costs than their competitors. Cleveland advises that there’s an urgent need to get CX right and offers a bold approach to help you make the right CX decisions.
The Customer Success Economy
by Nick Mehta and Allison Pickens
Recommended by Uniphore
This book focuses on the importance of building digital offerings into customer success and becoming “more Amazon-like” with innovative digital implementations. It argues that businesses that don’t integrate digital offerings will be left behind within the next decade. The book is filled with examples of how to transform your business and strategies to deliver customer service practices that encourage customer retention and recurring revenue.
A particular focus is how your entire organization needs to work together to offer a complete service to customers. This includes transforming leadership roles, organizational charts, responsibilities and strategies.
Never Lose a Customer Again
by Joey Coleman
Recommended by Logan Lyles, VP of CX at Sweet Fish Media
Award-winning business consultant Joey Coleman advises readers on how to transform one-time purchasers into lifelong customers. His book explores the crucial first 100 days after any sale, during which many customers feel neglected by brands and stop doing business with an organization. This includes the interactions that take place along the customer journey in those 100 days, which often sees customers’ euphoria, excitement and joy quickly turn into doubt, fear and uncertainty.
Coleman pinpoints eight emotional phases that new customers go through and explores how businesses can recognize and anticipate their customers’ emotions. The book draws on case studies of leading organizations that have succeeded in delivering exceptional customer experiences. It also outlines a customer retention system that applies to businesses of any size in all industries, which can help you implement an approach that creates long-lasting changes, increases profits and encourages lifelong customers.
The Experience Maker
by Dan Gingiss
Recommended by Randy Ksar, host of Uniphore’s podcast Conversations that Matter
Dan Gingiss is a keynote speaker and customer experience coach with a professional background spanning more than 20 years at companies like McDonald’s, Discover, and Humana. His upcoming book The Experience Maker (coming out on September 14, 2021) will answer the question how can your company stand out in a crowded marketplace that is constantly evolving? Through customer experience! Dan shares how improving your customers’ experience can be the leverage you need to stand out from the competition. Your customers can become your marketers and best salespeople. Using his techniques you will be more credible, engaging, and authentic more so than any other type of campaign.
Would You Do That to Your Mother?
by Jeanne Bliss
Recommended by Mike Aoki, President of Reflective Keynotes and contact center expert
This book from Jeanne Bliss, a customer experience pioneer, encourages organizations to make business personal in a five-step guide to improving customer experience and achieving culture transformation. It offers practical, relatable customer experience management advice based on 32 case studies and further examples of CX excellence from more than 85 organizations. It’s also an accessible and approachable guide to CX, thanks to comics that snapshot customer experiences, a “mom lens” that allows you to reflect on your performance and a “make-mom-proud-ometer” quiz.
Bliss provides deep insight into how you can readdress your CX approach at all levels of your business. So if you’re developing a new returns policy, reshaping your social media presence or developing a successful big-picture business strategy, this book can help you meet your customers’ needs.
Your Favorite CX Books
Do you have a favorite CX book that should be added to this list? Let us know by tweeting @uniphore.
To learn more about Uniphore and how we can improve your organization’s customer experience, get in touch with one of our experts today.