"Measuring Customer Experience: How to Develop and Execute the Most Profitable Customer Experience Strategies" Bestseller on Amazon.com - Get your copy @ goo.gl/W45bA0.

"Measuring Customer Experience: How to Develop and Execute the Most Profitable Customer Experience Strategies" Bestseller on Amazon.com . Get your copy @ goo.gl/W45bA0.

Get your Ebook @Amazon http://goo.gl/W45bA0, or Google books http://goo.gl/tfO2Fv, or your hardcover @Palgrave http://goo.gl/Xrv5R7. https://lnkd.in/divRwvt

Reviews 

'Phil knows what it takes to win. And that is exactly what Measuring Customer Experience provides to managers who want their companies to win through building strong relationships with customers.' -Timothy Keiningham, PhD, Global Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President, Ipsos Loyalty; Bestselling Author of The Wallet Allocation Rule and Why Loyalty Matters 

'Dr Phil Klaus's investigation and findings on how to measure and improve Customer Experience addresses one of the most pressing issues for marketeers and businesses today. His erudite approach to the subject breaks new ground with the EXQ technique being one that will in due course filter down into the practice of advanced marketeers.' -Crispin Rogers, Director Targeted Marketing, Visa Europe  

'Move past individual customer service with this systematic 'next-practice' guide to thinking beyond the simple transaction, enhancing your total customer experience and increasing profitability.' -Ian Di Tullio, Director Loyalty Marketing , Air Canada  

'This book provides a useful roadmap, addressing the pressing questions managers face: Where are we currently in terms of managing and measuring customer experience? Where do we want to be? And most important, how do we get there?' -Katherine N. Lemon, PhD, Accenture Professor of Marketing, Chair, Marketing Department, Carroll School of Management, Boston College

'We know that customer loyalty is one of the most important drivers for the business performance, particularly at a professional service firm. However, we didn't know what exactly affected it. Through dedicated research, Phil clearly demonstrated the solution by presenting the conceptual model and measurement tool. This is an excellent book and I strongly recommend this to all the executives involved in measuring everything related to customers.' -Dr. Junichi Kato, Managing Director TMF Group Japan

How To Create The Most Profitable Luxury Customer Experience

My latest book chapter exploring the keys of how to execute the best LUXURY Customer Experience programs is now available at http://www.marketinghorloger.ch/. "After sales services: new demands" 

Key take aways from my LUXURY CX Research:

My study is the first to a) conceptualize and validate the CX continuum in the luxury sector, b) validate and quantify the crucial impact of after-sales services on luxury customers’ behavior, and c) exploring and validating the impact of corresponding actions on the profitability of luxury goods companies.

For those of you in the luxury goods and service sector, feel free contact me directly for an executive summary of the findings.

CustomerThink.com Editor's Pick: What do you think, boss? How to gain board support for your Customer Experience (CX) program

According to our most recent research, CX Management, for better or worse, is firmly allocated in the firm’s marketing function. This association, however, triggers multiple challenges for CX managers, or, to be more precise, CMOs worldwide. The most prevalent challenge is the CEOs’ and boardroom members’ unfavorable perception of both marketing-led strategies and CMOs. For decades, marketers have been trying to be more accountable and elevate marketing from a purely functional and tactical to a strategic level. Yet marketing, once the darling of executives’ strategic efforts, remains heavily criticized for its inability to present compelling evidence of the effectiveness of the huge sums it directs to promotion and brand building. This perceived lack of accountability is reducing marketing’s influence on strategic decision-making, and is a cause of other functions.

Read the entire article original article HERE

Or on CustomerThink.com

The forgotten asset – the crucial role of the employee in delivering great Customer Experience (CX)

The employee, the forgotten asset? Forgotten is a day and age when the consumer calls the shots and consumer to consumer (C2C) interactions seemingly rule the business world (Klaus 2013a; 2013b)? Or, has the tide turned again, and managers do recognize that employee retention is crucial from both a primary (think cost of hiring, training, and possible loss of productivity by hiring a new employee), and secondary cost factor (e.g., disengagement, customer service and errors, and a negative cultural impact caused by high turnover)? Let’s start out investigating the ‘status quo’ of employees in today’s business environment, with a special focus on services...

Read my latest post in a series for the Center for Services Leadership HERE.

Are all channels truly equal? How to design and manage a successful Multichannel Customer Experience (CX) Program

Editor's Pick @ CustomerThink.com

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing insights from my research and consulting work in a series of posts, which will discuss critical aspects to delivering successful CX experience. You can read the first post, Demystifying The Black Box – How To Design, Manage, And Measure The Most Profitable Customer Experience (CX) Strategies, here. The series will conclude with a podcast with the Center for Services Leadership, where I will be answering questions from the CX community. I invite you to share your questions and comments through the blog or via Twitter (#CXquestion) and I’ll be happy to address them in the podcast. This is the second post in the CX series.

Social Media—a manager’s curse or blessing. To use the words of some of my clients, “As if managing offline channels wasn’t hard enough already?”

Managers worldwide, while almost evangelistically embracing the new multi-channel environment, are often left with very little guidance on: (a) how to take advantage of online channels, (b) how to develop a corresponding multichannel strategy, and (c) how to manage the multi-channel strategy in the best possible fashion. This, in turn, leads to frustration in the boardroom about both the benefits of online channels and the influence on the overall customer experience (Klaus, 2014a).

CEOs worldwide are questioning the push towards adding new online channels, and whether they are destined to be an expensive cost-of-doing-business to meet customers’ ever-rising expectations of service quality, with no incremental return (Klaus et al., 2014). The alternative may be a different impact upon business performance that might better assess, and, therefore, improve how positive outcomes are generated from multi-channel strategies (Maklan, Peppard and Klaus, forthcoming).

In our global research, which consists of multiple longitudinal studies dissecting multi-channel strategies and their performance, we explore a dynamic, competitive environment. We developed a typology that can be used to benchmark existing practices to the described state of management, including how different multi-channel practices are linked to performance. We found clear evidence that social media has an important role in successfully managing the multi-channel customer experience (Klaus, 2013). The most successful firms use social media for stakeholder communication, resource allocation, competitive environment tracking, and segmentation practice enhancement. Thus, social media delivers key insights for the internal and external perceptions of the entire multi-channel strategy, elevating it from being solely a channel of, to a key component of, the overall strategy.
Based on our results, we suggest that to develop and take advantage of opportunities, firms must:

1. develop an online channel strategy focused on multiple channels,
2. manage transformations of this strategy internally,
3. upgrade their skill sets, and
4. integrate new technologies such as mobile devices and social media, in order to
5. improve the customer experience.

The development of a new multi-channel transformation plan requires a coherent buy-in from all functions inside the firm. Our findings submit that many firms are struggling to come to a consensus on how these changes will be formulated and implemented. The documented tensions between the different channels have to be overcome in order to succeed with a company-wide accepted vision, including the new marketing approach reflecting the new channel mix.

Once this is achieved, firms face the task of managing the transformation internally. We found support for the proposition that the introduction of an online channel program influences the constellation of the entire firm. Entire business models and constellations, such as financial services (see Klaus et al., 2013), hospitality, retail, need to be scrutinized and reconsidered to adapt to the new multi-channel environment (for more details see Klaus, 2014b; Klaus and Nguyen, 2013).

The main benefit and challenge of the new multi-channel environment is to create immediate access throughout all channels, to not only gain insight in the new customer-experience-driven behavior pattern, but to also deliver the corresponding experiences. We found clear evidence that once organizational barriers to use of digital tools fade, they form a foundation of entirely new business processes.

For example, a national real estate agency now uses a platform allowing them, while at location with a client to sign a binding contract, to initiate loan application/approval, fix an appointment with the notary, set-up telecommunication, electricity, gas, and water services ‘right on the spot.’ This unique, customer-experience-focused solution led to higher customer satisfaction, positive recommendations, an increase in return business. A management consultant firm used social media effectively as a platform to allow their employees to engage in, and freely exchange ‘best practice’ examples, leading to both, a more defined learning and experience exchange, and higher employee satisfaction. These processes, thus, in turn, improve performance significantly. Firms able to address and master the multi-channel challenges deliver better customer experiences, leading to superior financial performances. (Klaus, 2014b)

There is no doubt that the online channel is a crucial ingredient in firm strategies worldwide. Firms will use them to support a range of business processes to create stronger links to employees, suppliers, customers and vendors. A key challenge that remains is managing unavoidable multi-channel strategies in which all channels – face-to-face and online – must co-exist and deliver the best customer experience possible (Klaus and Maklan, 2013). Thus, all channels are truly equally important.

Read my latest column in the Financial Times on managing the student experience in Higher Education

Getting the measure of university

 

By Phil Klaus

 

Student experience would improve if expectations were managed from the outset

 
Delivering a great student experience is one of the higher education hot topics. Just like businesses, universities are struggling to define the exact nature and scope of their customers’ experiences.

There is no doubt that the university experience has changed over the decades. Advances in technology, improvements to university infrastructure and better, more diversified, education for both students and educators are just some of the main benefits...

Read the entire article here

Show Me the Money: How Organizations Generate Return from Technology-Led-Marketing Change

Read our latest European JM article: Show Me the Money: Improving our Understanding of How Organizations Generate Return from Technology-Led-Marketing Change HERE.

Marketing practice is increasingly shaped through the application of new technology, including customer relationship marketing (CRM) software, social media, analytics and search, with organizations investing heavily in these technologies. Yet, surprisingly, empirically grounded research continues to question the profitability of IT-led marketing initiatives. If this is true, why do companies continue to make such investments? To explore this question, contrasted marketing and IS scholarship on the impact of CRM investment on financial performance. We find that whilst both try to determine what generates return, the IS community has a broader epistemological framework that allows it to understand better how benefits are realized. By marrying the what and the why, we demonstrate how organizations can generate great returns from technology-led-marketing.

New Customer Experience Management Book - worth the read

Read my upcoming book chapter on Customer Experience Strategy at Kendall-Hunt https://www.kendallhunt.com/customer_experience/, or, better, get the entire book. Truly great stuff.

Gain access to our top-cited 2013 Online CX Strategy and 24 other marketing articles from Taylor&Francis for free

Gain access to our top-cited 2013 Online CX Strategy and 24 other marketing articles from Taylor&Francis for free HERE.

Read highly research published in selected Routledge Marketing journals in 2013 and 2014 online for FREE.
We've put together an online collection of highly cited articles from our journals listed in the Social Sciences Citations Index® based on popular themes including branding management, advertising and social media promotion.

Exploring the role of the online customer experience in firms' multi-channel strategy: An empirical analysis of the retail banking services sector Journal of Strategic Marketing Phil Klaus & Bang Nguyen

Marketing Highly Cited Business Highly Cited 2014 explore.tandfonline.com

Taylor & Francis Online provides access to, and information about, all journals from Taylor & Francis and Routledge. Search or browse a portfolio of over 1,700 journals from the Taylor & Francis Group. Taylor & Francis Group partners with...

 

Editor's Pick @customerthink.com: Demystifying The Black Box – How To Design, Manage, And Measure The Most Profitable Customer Experience (CX) Strategies

CX blogs, consultants, programs, workshops, conferences, indexes, frameworks, awards, summits, metrics, NPS – CX is everywhere and widely considered the next competitive battleground. Managers, consultants, scholars, and even politicians seem to agree that the age of the customer has finally arrived and we are better going to be ready for it. The new customer needs new solutions, and blue chips companies like Siemens, IBM, Adobe, Google are standing by, ready to deliver. CRM is proclaimed dead, and CX management in an area where the customer calls the shots is the declared new silver bullet for companies worldwide. Managers read the great CX stories of Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks, and are left wondering how this will apply to their business? Moreover, while we still struggle to coherently define what constitutes CX, we already discuss the next generation of CX management, the role of social media, cloud networks in delivering excellent experiences in the CX revolution you tube channel.

CX established itself as one of the top priorities on companies’ strategic agendas. It really doesn’t matter if we talk about a B2B, B2C, or even C2C context, customers will always have an experience, good or bad, and it will influence their purchasing behavior – significantly. And not only their own behavior, but also the behavior of others; courtesy of the blessing – or the curse, depending on your viewpoint – of the www and social media (Klaus 2013). Our longitudinal global research clearly indicates that delivering superior experiences is, if not the source of, a sustainable competitive advantage. However, while acknowledging CX’s strategic importance is a step in the right direction, the main challenges go beyond acknowledgement.

Read the original post HERE.

Or, go to the Editor's Pick HERE.

Take a 'look inside' our latest book chapter highlighting emphasizes CX as the ultimate revenue and profit driver

Take a 'look inside' our latest book chapter highlighting emphasizes CX as the ultimate revenue and profit driver HERE

Striking the Right Balance: How to Design, Implement, and Operationalize Customer Experience Management Programs Phil Klaus and Bo Edvardsson (2014)

 

Towards practical relevance — Delivering superior firm performance through digital customer experience strategies

Towards practical relevance — Delivering superior firm performance through digital customer experience strategies.

Managers, consultants and scholars alike consider the digital customer experience (CX) as the next competitive battleground for firms worldwide. The development of corresponding CX strategies, however, faces a number of challenges. First, similar to all emerging fields of management, there is no universally accepted definition of the concept, its scope and how it relates to associated management initiatives, such as quality and satisfaction. Second, it is widely accepted that CX is very context-specific and that there is unlikely to be a generally applicable ‘play book’ appropriate across all industries and company strategies. Scholars portray CX disparately by exploring important facets at, regrettably, high levels of abstraction. Therefore, their research fails to consider the vital role of management in the process. In spite of a plethora of published CX definitions and conceptual frameworks, there remains a need for both theoretical and conceptual development, and empirical research to determine which digital CX strategies and practices have the most positive influence on organizational performance. To contribute to the development of CX practice and what the author characterizes as a Theory of Relevance, this article argues that scholars must conduct research to reveal current CX management practices as a necessary foundation for providing direction. A typology of CX practice will act as the foundation to explore the link between practice and performance. This study uses this typology to highlight the superior performance of firms executing a value-driven digital customer experience strategy. These vanguards, unlike others, apply value creation to all stakeholders of their business. Their business practice reflects these principles by developing a strategy crossing departmental boundaries and integrating all of the firm’s functions into one aim — delivering superior digital customer experiences.

Read and download: The role of service systems in executing customer-service experience strategies: A critical examination of existing practices (Edvardsson and Klaus 2014).

Read and download HERE: The role of service systems in executing customer-service experience strategies: A critical examination of existing practices (Edvardsson and Klaus 2014). 

Service systems enable value propositions based on creating both, favorable customer service experiences and business value. Value is experiential, individual, contextual, and meaning-laden. Scholars posit that companies must (a) offer a value proposition based on customers value perceptions, (b) align service systems with these value perceptions, and (c) incorporate customers as a resource to co-create value. In order to empirically test these propositions we examine service experience (hereafter SX) strategies and the corresponding service systems from a firm's viewpoint. This discussion not only led to development of the SXSL, which scholars believe guides firms to develop value propositions and service systems to incorporate the customer as a resource to co-create value, but also to achieving crucial connections between SX strategies and firm performance. We illustrate the effectiveness of the framework with the case of Banca di Popolare di Bari (BPB), an Italian bank implementing an SX strategy based on SXSL. This is, to our knowledge, the first empirical study demonstrating the effect of applying a co-creation-led service experience strategy to firm performance.

Free access to: Preservers, Transformers & Vanguards: Measuring the Profitability of Customer Experience Strategies @ http://www.readcube.com/articles/10.1111/drev.10260

CX may be “the next competitive battleground”, but we’re still struggling to define it.
More to the point, we have to find a way to measure CX. Otherwise, how can we become better at managing it?
Free access HERE

 

Validating the importance of all stages of the Customer Experience: The Customer Experience Continuum

Validating the importance of all stages of the Customer Experience: The Customer Experience Continuum, read it HERE.

Your customers’ perceptions and evaluations of customer experience often develop over a series of interaction, purchasing, and consumption episodes with your firm. Most services require customers to engage with a firm multiple times over an extended period of time (Klaus & Maklan 2013). These experiences are dynamic in nature, and managers need to understand how the customers’ needs change as the interactions with the firm progress. To understand the underlying triggers of these changes is even more significant to the firm given the importance of increasing customer retention and loyalty and building long-term profitable relationships with their customers.

As these customer experience episodes increase over time, marketers need to understand what attributes of these interactions drive the desirable customer behavior at the different stages of the relationship with their respective customer (Klaus & Maklan 2011).

In a longitudinal global study, covering multiple contexts and industries Prof. Dr. Phil Klaus, Professor of Customer Experience and Marketing Strategy at ESCE International Business School, not only explores these stages, but, more importantly, investigates how they influence customer behavior.

When Sports Mean Business

Sharing my thoughts on the secret(s) of a successful sports sponsorship campaign with Qatar Foundation Think. Magazine's reporter Alex Delmar-Morgan @ http://goo.gl/gyqPkn.

So what is the secret behind a successful sports sponsorship campaign - See more at: http://www.qf.org.qa/page?a=835&lang=en-CA#sthash.kRIqSpaL.dpuf

So what is the secret behind a successful sports sponsorship campaign - See more at: http://www.qf.org.qa/page?a=835&lang=en-CA#sthash.kRIqSpaL.dpuf