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Customer Success Summer Reading List
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As we move into the dog days of summer, you might find yourself trying to stay cool by the pool or at the beach with a cold drink and book in hand. If you aren’t sure what you should read this summer, don’t sweat. We’ve compiled this list of Customer Success related books to add to your summer reads.
Enjoy!
1.) Consumption Economics: The New Rules of Tech
If you’re a tech company, the most dramatic effect of megatrends like cloud computing, managed services, and the rise of consumer technology won’t be felt in your company’s product line. The true disruption will be to your business model. Future customers won’t want to pay you high prices out of big “CapEx” budgets anymore. They will expect lower “cloud” prices paid from “OpEx” budgets only when and if they successfully consume the business value of your products. How your company reacts to this risk shift could either accelerate the commoditization of your products or lead you to a new stage of profitable growth. For the first time, the tools are on the table to truly eliminate barriers of cost and complexity created by the last generation of tech. Consumption Economics is the owner’s manual for tech company executives who want to drive their company successfully into the next one.
2.) The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experience Have Extraordinary Impact
While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection. If we embrace these elements, we can conjure more moments that matter. What if a teacher could design a lesson that he knew his students would remember 20 years later? What if a manager knew how to create an experience that would delight customers? What if you had a better sense of how to create memories that matter for your children?
This book delves into some fascinating mysteries of experience: Why we tend to remember the best or worst moment of an experience as well as the last moment and forget the rest. Why “we feel most comfortable when things are certain, but we feel most alive when they’re not”. And why our most cherished memories are clustered into a brief period during our youth.
Many of the defining moments in our lives are the result of accident or luck – but why would we leave our most meaningful, memorable moments to chance when we can create them? The Power of Moments shows us how to be the author of richer experiences.
3.) Would You Do That to Your Mother? The Make Mom Proud Standard for How to Treat Your Customers
“Make Mom Proud” companies give customers the treatment they desire, and employees the ability to deliver it. They turn “gotcha” moments into “we’ve got your back” moments by rethinking business practices, and they enable employees to be part of the solution to fix customer frustrations.
Bliss scoured the marketplace seeking companies who excel at living their core values, grounded in what we all learned as kids. She offers a five-step plan for evaluating your current behaviors and implementing actions at every level of the organization.
4.) The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty
The Effortless Experience takes readers on a fascinating journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes customers loyal—and disloyal. The authors lay out the four key pillars of a low-effort customer experience, along the way delivering robust data, shocking insights and profiles of companies that are already using the principles revealed by CEB’s research, with great results. And they include many tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, decrease customer churn, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the “dazzle factor” fails to deliver.
The idea that companies must delight customers by exceeding service expectations is so entrenched that managers rarely even question it. They devote untold time, energy, and resources to trying to dazzle people and inspire their undying loyalty. Yet CEB’s careful research over five years and tens of thousands of respondents proves that the “dazzle factor” is wildly overrated—it simply doesn’t predict repeat sales, share of wallet, or positive word of-mouth. The reality:
Loyalty is driven by how well a company delivers on its basic promises and solves day-to-day problems, not on how spectacular its service experience might be. Most customers don’t want to be “wowed”; they want an effortless experience. And they are far more likely to punish you for bad service than to reward you for good service.
5.) HYPERGROWTH: How the Customer-Driven Model Is Revolutionizing the Way Businesses Build Products, Teams, & Brands
Are you communicating with your customers on a regular basis? Do you know how to manage and prioritize customer feedback once you’ve gathered it? When it comes to building a great product, a great team, and a great brand, relying solely on the opinions of internal stakeholders will get you nowhere. The key to achieving HYPERGROWTH is being customer-driven. So if you’re ready to start putting your customers first, keep reading…
What You’ll Learn: A New Approach to Product Management and Developing SaaS Products People Love
Today, there’s no excuse for not communicating with customers on a daily basis. Messaging has exploded, new generations are focused on 1:1 communication by default, and artificial intelligence is finally coming so we can deliver 1:1 at scale. So why would you build a product, or a company, without leaning into the advantages of that ecosystem?
In his book, HYPERGROWTH, serial entrepreneur and Drift co-founder/CEO David Cancel shares a modern approach for building products and structuring teams that makes customer communication a central priority. The book tells the story of how Cancel’s customer-driven approach started out as a test with a product team (Performable), transformed an entire organization (HubSpot), and sparked a new movement (Drift).
Churn Monster Playbook: Your Definitive Guide to Fighting Customer Churn
In this playbook, we will catalog the twelve common monsters that attack customer retention. For each churn monster, we will give a description of what its churn risk looks like, so you can easily identify it within your customer accounts. We will also give you actionable tips to help you combat each churn monster, and insight into how ChurnZero can help.
Download this playbook now to learn how to fight customer churn.
Customer Success Around the Web
- Should You Be Listening to Your Customers Less? – Not all customer feedback is created equal – shaping your company’s future solely based on what they think may prove lethal.
- What is NPS? The Ultimate Guide – Learn more about Net Promoter Score and why it plays such a key role in your companies success.
- Customer Lifecycle Marketing: Best Strategies to Increase Profit – Understanding the behavior of your customers can help you create an effective lifecycle marketing strategy.