Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

This book provides a well-structured account of how to improve and implement a customer experience ecosystem, backing up their examples with their own research and case studies (including Barclaycard US, BBVA, Boeing, John Deere Financial, Ecosytem Maps, FedEx, Fidelity Charitable, Holiday Inn, Mayo Clinic, Vanguard, and Walgreens). There are examples of how to create an “ecosystem map” and  step-by-step, examples of customer experience measurement/metrics (descriptive, perception, outcome). They also recommend the creation of a chief customer officer role, devoting a chapter to the function.

If interested in detailed steps and tools (templates, exercises) for implementation, this book falls short. The authors do provide many good suggestions and outline what areas need to be covered, however. The book ends with a “What Next” page, where they refer you to their website for what they describe as resources if the reader “likes the ideas in this book and want to act on them,” which may be intended more as a way to sell their services than providing more detailed literature.

Based on fourteen years of research by the customer experience leaders at Forrester Research, Outside In offers a complete roadmap to attaining the experience advantage. It starts with the concept of the Customer Experience Ecosystem—proof that the roots of customer experience problems lie not just with customer-facing employees like your sales staff, but with behind-the-scenes employees like accountants, lawyers, and programmers, as well as the policies, processes, and technologies that all your employees use every day. Identifying and solving these problems has the potential to dramatically increase sales and decrease costs.

Provides step-by-step examples of how to evaluate and transform an organization to focus on customer experience, with a good balance between theory and practice. Includes sections on creating a customer experience ecosystem map, with examples from Virgin Media along with suggestions (and chapters) for measurement and governance, along with some useful examples of customer experience metrics. For more on this subject, see Customer Experience Strategy (Senteo review).