Recommended Reading
Discover great books to help you improve customer experience, customer service, or your business in general. Each book listed includes an exclusive interview with the author.
Click on an author’s name to jump to their interview:
Jeannie Walters: Experience is Everything
Matt Dixon: The Effortless Experience
Randi Busse: Turning Rants Into Raves
Adam Toporek: Be Your Customer’s Hero
Shep Hyken: The Cult of the Customer
Jeanne Bliss: Would You Do That To Your Mother?
Chip Bell: Inside Your Customer’s Imagination
Annette Franz: Customer Understanding
Ben Yoder: Do Better Work
Elizabeth Swan: The Problem-Solver’s Toolkit
Shaun Belding: The Journey to Wow
Experience is Everything
by Jeannie Walters
Get results with CX by aligning your work with organizational goals.
This interview with Jeannie Walters, author of Experience is Everything, reveals advice for getting your organization to align around customer experience.
Walters answers:
What is CX?
How do you connect CX to what your CEO cares about?
What is a CX Mission (and why do you need one)?
What is the purpose of journey mapping?
The Effortless Experience
by Matt Dixon
Delighting customers is not the goal.
That’s counterintuitive advice shared by customer experience expert and bestselling author, Matthew Dixon. It’s a perspective that’s backed by research.
“Customers who are surprised and delighted are no more loyal than customers whose expectations are simply met,” says Dixon. A better way to create loyal customers is to reduce the amount of effort required for customers to do business with you.
In our interview, Dixon shares four ways to reduce customer effort.
Turning Rants Into Raves
by Randi Busse
Customer service speaker and trainer, Randi Busse, is focused on employee ownership.
She’s created two personas, Rant and Rave, the highlight two types of employees we see in nearly every business. Rants are just collecting a paycheck and are disinterested in great work. Raves act and think like owners, and go out of their way to take care of customers.
In our interview, Busse explains how customer service leaders and small business owners influence employees to either become a Rant or a Rave.
Be Your Customer’s Hero
by Adam Toporek
Adam Toporek, has a unique definition of heroism.
When it comes to serving customers, being a hero means being there when a customer needs you.
His book is a practical guide that helps frontline employees deliver “hero class” customer service in everyday situations.
In our interview, Toporek explains how you don’t have to wait for extraordinary situations to be a hero. There are opportunities to be a hero to your customer in nearly every interaction.
The Cult of the Customer
by Shep Hyken
How do you create an amazing customer experience?
New York Times bestselling author, Shep Hyken, charts a clear path in the new edition of his classic book.
The book outlines five stages, or “cults,” that customers pass through. The first is a “cult of uncertainty,” where customers never know exactly what to expect.
Companies that offer a “cult of amazement,” create experiences that are “consistently above average.”
In our interview, Hyken explains why the word “cult,” is not a bad word, and why going for “wow” isn’t practical.
Would You Do That To Your Mother?
by Jeanne Bliss
Customer Experience pioneer, Jeanne Bliss, introduces the “Make Mom Proud” standard for looking at customer experience.
The concept is that if you wouldn’t subject your mother to a poor experience, you shouldn’t be doing it to your customers.
The book full of real examples and great advice.
Bliss is entertaining and insanely helpful in this video interview, where she breaks down exactly what you need to do to get your CEO to care about customer experience.
Inside Your Customer's Imagination
by Chip Bell
Customers notoriously struggle to describe what they want.
Customer experience expert, Chip Bell, weaves entertaining stories and helpful suggestions into a practical guide to getting inside your customer's head. This valuable information is the key to unlocking great ideas that become new products, service, and solutions.
In our interview, Bell tells some fun stories about a pizza company re-thinking the pizza box, a hotel general manager holding focus groups with taxi drivers, a pharmaceutical company learning the secret to keeping patients in clinical trials, and many more examples that go beyond traditional voice of customer tactics.
Customer Understanding
by Annette Franz
Customer experience expert, Annette Franz, has put together a practical guide to improving customer experience.
The book covers three big topics:
Listening to customers
Creating customer personas
Customer journey mapping
It’s an essential toolkit for creating a customer experience program.
In this video, Franz joined me to discuss how journey mapping is essential to elevating the customer experience.
Do Better Work
by Ben Yoder
Max Yoder is the CEO of Lessonly, a company that provides easy-to-use training software. Yoder’s book shares practical tips and insights he learned as an entrepreneur that can help you do better work in a company or team.
The chapters are short and story-driven, so it’s easy to pick up quick tips you can use immediately.
In this interview with Yoder, we discuss how you can improve individual or team performance by focusing on what’s working.
The Problem-Solver's Toolkit
by Elizabeth Swan
Elisabeth Swan thinks about process a lot.
She's the managing partner of GoLeanSixSigma.com, a company that provides Lean Six Sigma training and certification.
Swan co-authored The Problem-Solver’s Toolkit with Tracy O’Rourke to provide a resource guide full of easy-to-use process improvement tools.
In this interview, Swan shares a technique called “swimlane mapping” that can prevent customer service issues from falling through the cracks.
The Journey to Wow
by Shaun Belding
Customer Experience expert, Shaun Belding, wrote The Journey to Wow as a parable.
It’s a surprisingly effective way to help readers understand key customer experience concepts such as journey mapping, customer feedback, and the importance of working across functions.
Most important, you’ll discover that customer experience is more than just another name for customer service.
In this conversation, Belding shares advice for getting executives to buy-in to customer experience initiatives.