Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine Book Notes

Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of your Business by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine
Book Notes

The top 5 quotes/concept from the book

p78
So what’s the right customer experience for your company?

p92
There are three key methods you need to know about: mining unsolicited customer feedback, conducting ethnographic research, and gathering input from employees.

p109
Design is the most important business discipline that you’ve probably never heard of.

p157
“We celebrate technology that improves the customer experience, and we kill technologies that are no longer relevant. And when he says kill, he means it. The company holds funerals for dead software applications.

p219
you need your customers more than they need you

Other noteworthy quotes or comments

p29
When we field the Cxi survey, we ask consumers to tell us three things: How willing they are to make another purchase from each company, how likely they are to switch business to a competitor, and how likely they are to recommend each company to a friend.

p30
even small shifts in customer loyalty can translate into billions of dollars in incremental revenue per year for companies in two industries: hotels and wireless service providers

p37
… a culture of compliance … this made them look hard-charging and dynamic: Tell me what you want to do and I’ll go do it … but this behavior caused unneeded customer pain. . . frontline employees salute and execute any directive even if their own experience told them it was wrong for the customer.

p45
How can you help those players understand the ways in which their own actions ripple through the broad ecosystem? The best way is to deconstruct the ecosystem by mapping it.

p67
The customer understanding discipline is a set of practices that creates a consistent shared understanding of who customers are, what they want and need, and how they perceive the interactions they’re having with your company today. In other words, it’s the thing that replaces everyone’s best guesses about customers with real, actionable insights about customers.

p71
For example, Canada Post requires all funding requests from any department to answer ten customer-focused questions in the business case.

p72
You’re not going to succeed through manufacturing strength, distribution power, or information mastery – those have all been commoditized. And you can’t win by controlling the flow of information about your products and services, either.

p84
… make the strategy come to life … a compelling way to do it: Turn ten thousand square feet of office space in downtown Madrid into the banking equivalent of a concept car … In just twenty minutes, you’ve been completely immersed in BBVA’s strategy to become THE customer-centric bank.

p99
Your end goal isn’t the personas and journey maps themselves. Your end goal is deep customer insights, which just happen to be encapsulated in these particular formats.

p102-103
Lambert created a physical listening post in Adobe’s headquarters . . . that immersion program has significantly changed the company’s conversations and priorities.

p113
Oliver King … says, design is an activity that’s best done WITH people, not TO them.

p124
When survey responses come back, an internal system attaches operational data, such as what channel each customer used to book his or her flight and whether there were any problems with the plane they were on. That lets JetBlue analysts correlate satisfaction scores with the likely reasons that the scores rose or fell.

p125
“Sharing positive customer feedback directly with the crew members is a fantastic motivator, and a far better way of reinforcing the JetBlue experience than a supervisor providing negative feedback.”

p126
It does this by capturing what actually happened during a customer interaction (such as a flight), how the customer felt about the interaction, and whether the customer is willing to recommend JetBlue afterward.

p128
What did the customer think about what happened

p149
“The most important thing,” says Soren, “is that you must really have the courage to believe that local managers and your staff want to create a good customer experience. It’s about letting go of a bit of the control. That was the hardest part.”

p160-161
Unfortunately, many companies make huge investments in hiring and training only to inadvertently encourage employees to focus on the wrong things. How? They create operational targets for frontline employees instead of basing their incentives on the quality of the service they provide.

p163
Tom pitted market and market in a race to improve their Net Promoter Scores.

p175
consistency . . . not how well you perform it . . .We’ve observed that companies that consistently perform practices that are sound are way better off than companies that perform practices that MIGHT be better – but only do so on occasion.

p214
Customer Experience Innovations will provide a competitive edge

p214
What kinds of changes to customer experience will give you that edge and allow you to pull ahead of the competition? Where should you look for your future advantage?

p219
examine the reason why your company exists in the first place

p219
spend time learning what it feels like to be your customer

p220
Talk with your customers. Make it part of your everyday life … tell a fellow customer that you’re an employee – as well as a customer – and that you’d love to know whether they found what they needed on that visit, and how easy or hard that was.

p220
talk to your front line employees

p220 try mapping a customer experience ecosystem for one of your company’s most important customer journeys.

p221
try connecting the dots by building a simple business case for customer experience improvement project

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