Outside In

The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business

By: Harley Manning, Kerry Bodine

Narrated by: Mel Foster

The solution in each case was a focus on customer experience, the most powerful - and misunderstood - element of corporate strategy today. Customer experience is, quite simply, how your customers perceive their every interaction with your company. It’s a fundamental business driver. Here’s proof: over a recent five-year period during which the S&P 500 was flat, a stock portfolio of customer experience leaders grew 22 percent. In an age when customers have access to vast amounts of data about your company and its competitors, customer experience is the only sustainable source of competitive advantage. But how to excel at it?

Based on 14 years of research by the customer experience leaders at Forrester Research, Outside In offers a complete road map to attaining the experience advantage. It starts with the framework of the customer experience ecosystem, which reveals 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 with the policies, processes, and technologies that your employees use every day. Identifying and solving these problems has the potential to dramatically increase sales and decrease costs.

Outside In will teach you how to master the six disciplines of customer experience: Strategy, Customer Understanding, Design, Measurement, Governance, and Culture. You’ll see how Holiday Inn’s customer experience strategy led to a complete redesign of its lobbies and restaurants and how American Express reinvented its service culture, earning loyalty by providing a better experience. You’ll discover how Boeing redesigned the way it delivers information to match the needs of distinct customer types. And you’ll learn how Barclaycard U.S. assigns every major element of customer experience to a senior executive with the power to bulldoze internal roadblocks and solve customer problems that inhibit growth. Your gut already tells you that customer experience is the key to business success. Now you can prove it. And with the rigorous, battle-tested tools in this audiobook, you can tap the transformative power of managing from the outside in.

©2012 Harley Manning, Kerry Bodine (P)2012 Brilliance Audio, Inc.

Still very relevant & useful

I am looking to learn about CX in b2b for XaaS, but this coming from UX, this was a great starting point.

Some of the examples and tools are dated, but the concepts are all still very relevant & useful. I think it’d be useful to have the physical copy along with the audible version (which I ordered) for the visualizations described.

Great information but dry presentation

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The content was excellent, but the writing and speaker were a little stiff and dry.

What did you like best about this story?

The information and research was very helpful.

What aspect of Mel Foster’s performance would you have changed?

His tone was a little dull. He wasn't bad, but I think he could've been livelier and more engaging.

Who do you think would benefit most from listening to Outside In?

I think business professionals and corporate leaders would benefit most in order to better serve their customers.

Any additional comments?

This book provides a lot of great content, including case studies and research. It's very detailed and helps business leaders understand the importance of the customer experience and how to enhance the customer experience. While the content is good, the presentation is a little dry. But this should not deter you from digging into the book's vitally important information.

Great content!

This book has very useful information delivered in a disappointing robotic manner. I'm going to look into the other recommended resources!

CX from start to finish

Great book with wonderful insights for anyone in, or joining, the CX industry. Highly recommended.

Still highly relevant

I highly recommend the book and the CX principles it covers. Even though the book is almost a decade old, it's message is still highly relevant as most companies still offer poor CX.
We use "Milkymap" to map our Customer Journeys, and highly recommend it as a companion to this book!

an amazing book for an umbrella perspective on CX

This book is SO SO incredibly useful. While it does not provide hard details, on how exactly to execute each of the activities in Customer Experience, if for sure delivers an amazing overview!

What I value about this book the most, is that I can use it as a strategy for our CX! It's making me confident in the expectations I want/need to set for the colleagues at my company.

Story Telling is great

This book was easy to follow along and to grasp ambiguous concepts. Thank you for the real world examples.

cjharris

if your business has customers and back office process problems...you need to read this book!

101 Customer Experience Management

Would you try another book from Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine and/or Mel Foster?

Not likely

Would you recommend Outside In to your friends? Why or why not?

As a starter for customer experience it provides a good context but there is little groundbreaking thought leadership

Did Mel Foster do a good job differentiating all the characters? How?

It is a text book - delivery was fine

What did you take away from Outside In that you can apply to your work?

To an extent - more re-enforcement than new learnings

Any additional comments?

Good intro but fairly basic CEM book

It’s a tedious struggle…

I’m only a quarter way through, but felt compelled to write a review, albeit, prematurely. Perhaps this book reads better in physical form, but I am having a very difficult time listening to the narrator. I have no doubt he is talented and suited for other content, but so far this experience is akin to listening to hours upon hours of infomercials or safety announcements with the same cadence over…and over…and over again. While traveling, I am finding myself debating between continuing to listen to this audiobook or the drone of this commercial airplane.

It isn’t helpful that the content also feels poorly organized and disjointed. Anecdotes and stories move quickly from one to the next with little connection of unpacking of each. I have read several CX books recently, with the most recent being difficult to put down.

I highly recommend considering a different voice over artist with a more appropriate style and engaging tone to reread the audiobook. If I’m mapping out my customer journey I’m struggling with the “Use” phase and wishing for a “Fix”.