Jeanne Bliss is a guru in customer experience. Customer Bliss her website is packed full of great ideas and tools to help your business because more customer centric. Jeanne's book I love you more than your dog identifies 5 key decisions to make your business a beloved company. You know that sort of company that you tell your friends about. (threadless, zappos, moo, zipcar, modcloth, freshbooks, netflix, lands end, aussie farmers, grill'd, lorna jane, gapingvoid, mailchimp, nudie, incase). These companies:

Resources

Customer Bliss Website

Jeanne's Blog

Rick Harris is the managing director of the UK based design agency CustomerFaithful. A veteran in the customer experience space Rick has assisted many organisations identify what drives the beliefs and behaviours of their customers. Rick's Lifeline approach has been used in such industries as healthcare, transport, housing and leisure as he assists industries achieve their commerical goals while staying true to their customer needs and inspiring their employees.

Join Me as I chat with Rick.

Resources:

CustomerFaithful

Lee Cockerell has spent his career working for some of the best players in hospitality including, Hitlon, Marriot and Disney.He now consults around the world to businesses on customer service. In this interview with me Lee shares some of those old fashion values that our mum's taught us and why the little things are really the big things in delivering a sensational service. What would mum do? might just be the first question we should be asking.

Maddie Grant and Jamie Notter have written a book called Humanise - How People Centric organizations succeed in a social world. Maddie is a well-known blogger and partner in a successful social media consulting firm working with associations and non-profits, SocialFish, and she spent some time with me on this podcast. We discussed how organisations are becoming more engaged with social media and this is creating an environment of transparency. We now want understand the company from the inside out. We want to connect on a deeper and more human level. We explore this changing landscape. What it means to business and the larger community.

Resources:

Book

Humanise

Test your organisation

Kristin Zhivago started as a teacher like me but when she finished her teaching degree there was little in the
way of positions. Lucky for us she invested her time in sales and marketing and has spent her career seeking out customer insights by interviewing customers for organisations. Kristin is the author of the RoadMap to Revenue, How to sell the way your customers want to buy. I recently interviewed Kristen about her journey and asked her about the trends she is seeing in selling, about best practice questions when interviewing, the role of persona's and how the buyer journey has changed.

Kristin's website

Arne van Oosterom is the founder of the Design Thinkers Group and now the Design Thinkers Academy. DesignThinkers is one of the leading 'design driven' Innovation Agencies helping organizations around the world making the transition from being strictly product orientated and sales driven, towards being service orientated and human centered.

I really enjoyed talking with Arne. He gave insights into how companies have a great challenge on their hands as small nible companies compete on a global stage. Arne talks about the importance of design and how it is being reintroduced into companies like SAP and how the youth of today are looking for personal development rather than a 30 year career at one company. Arne explains how we are moving from product dominant logic to service dominant logic. Design thinking is a mindset and The is Service Design a book that Arne also contributed to introduces this service design thinking which is a valuable resource for all businesses to embrace. Learn about the "airsandwich" and how if you want to change the world service design might just be your calling.

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Design Thinkers Tools

Design Thinkers

Design Thinkers Academy

Buyer Persona's are an attempt to get inside the heads of our ideal customers and understand their motivations, influencers and decision making criteria. My chat with Vann Morris from MLTCreative a B2B marketing consulting agency explains how to use this app to shed some great insights into creating buyer personna's and to create a great interview list of questions to build this view of the customer.

Resources

MLTCreative Resource Center

Buyer Persona App

Adele Revella has built the Buyer Persona Institute to revolutionise the way we use buyer persona's in marketing. Rather than creating a buyer persona's to market to, Adele's approach called the Five Rings of Insight is based on creating insight through a research so that rather than presuming what is behind our ideal buyer's decision to buy from us or not, we know!

These steps include:

1. Priority Initiative- what problem are they trying to solve?

2. Success Factors - What outcome would be desirable in their words?

3. Pre-conceived Barriers - What is the bad news we need to hear about our solution or competitors offerings?

4. Buying Process - Who is involved and when?

5. Decision Criteria - How is the offering evaluated?

Adele shares some great insights how focusing on the buyer persona makes decisions can have a profound affect informing strategies for persuasive messaging, content marketing, product or solution launches, campaigns and sales alignment.

Resources:

The Buyer Persona Manifesto

The Buyer Persona Institute

Chris Risdon is a thought-leader in the customer experience and service design space.Chris has been designing digital products and services since 1996. He specializes in user experience strategy, information architecture and communication and interaction design. I was so delighted to interview Chris after following his work at AdaptivePath where he is described as follows:

"Chris's journeyman path has helped shape his belief that an interdisciplinary approach to design enables people to have compelling and useful experiences with the products and services around them."

This methodology was so interesting to me as a customer centric marketer, that I just had to speak with Chris.

Chris's discusses experience mapping, customer touch points and how this methodology is evolving as a way to test a companies value proposition and culture about becoming customer focused.

Resources:

Chris website

Chris's Slideshare

Andrew is such a talent. His career has taken him from local television to The Today Show. He's worked for
 The Muppets in New York and marketed for tiny start-ups as well as Fortune 500 brands. For over a decade Andrew acted as the Chief Strategy Officer at Tippingpoint Labs, where he rallied his team to lead the charge to change the way publishers think and how brands market their products. Today, Andrew travels the world sharing his innovative ideas as a speaker, consultant and guest lecturer. Andrew's concepts in his book Brandscaping help reshape the way you think, enabling you to navigate the overwhelming and sometimes confusing digital landscape.

Brandscaping is about leveraging the relationships that make sense to your audience and creating content, services and products that give you partnerships to new audiences and position your brand in a way that no other marketing medium can. Andrew gives us lots of rich examples of small and large businesses that have taken on board this collaboration approach to creating a brand identity that really resonates.