Welcome to the Monthly Mash, a mashup of tools, tales and tips on customer service and the customer experience from around the blogosphere.
This month’s customer experience resource is a book on marketing — so I guess I should explain.
Marketing in the Round by Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston is a book written by marketers for marketers. It promotes the concept of a marketing round, an integrated circle of marketing disciplines devoid of bureaucratic and political barriers that works together towards a common strategic goal.
To be frank, I never intended to write about Marketing in the Round on Customers That Stick. Though I do know one of the authors, I bought MITR because as a small business owner, I try to keep abreast of what is current in all areas of business.
I pre-ordered the book expecting it to be an insightful look at marketing and marketing integration (and it is); however, I had no expectations that the book would provide any more than a tangential crossover to the topics of this site: customer service and the customer experience.
Sure, Marketing in the Round focuses heavily on marketing techniques and strategies; however, it also addresses one of the great challenges of customer experience professionals worldwide: integrating organizations so that everyone can focus on creating a seamless and memorable customer experience.
The lessons on integration alone make the book a great resource for CX professionals. A few concepts from Chapter 9: Integration will be illustrative:
In addition to the chapter on integration, numerous chapters have information of direct value to CX professionals, most notably Chapter 10: Plan The Entire Tactical Effort and Chapter 11: Measure Results to Dollars and Cents.
In the end, Marketing in the Round is more than just a great book on marketing; it is a resource for anyone trying to understand how to get divergent stakeholders to act together towards a common goal.
Buy it here; you won’t be disappointed.
To connect further with the authors, check them out on Twitter (Gini Dietrich and Geoff Livingston) or on their blogs Spin Sucks and Geoff Livingston.com.
A collection of the best posts about customer service and the customer experience I read this past month.
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Sometimes the most popular post from the previous month; sometimes just the one I liked best.
What Is a Loyalty Program (And Will It Work for You) – This post attempted to define loyalty programs and to evaluate how effective they are. Some interesting statistics on loyalty programs are in the piece — for example, 84 percent of loyalty program members are likely to choose the program retailer over its competitor — however, my favorite parts of this post were the comments.
We hope you enjoyed the June Monthly Mash. See you in July!
By Adam Toporek. Adam Toporek is an internationally recognized customer service expert, keynote speaker, and workshop leader. He is the author of Be Your Customer's Hero: Real-World Tips & Techniques for the Service Front Lines (2015), as well as the founder of the popular Customers That Stick® blog and co-host of the Crack the Customer Code podcast.