While working for several years in a comic book store, MRTIM started drawing the more memorable customers and the things that they said. Based on the blog of the same name, and featuring popular entries as well as brand-new cartoons, Our Valued Customers chronicles the lively, witty, and often acerbic opinions and comments of the customers who shop at comic book stores, providing a fascinating glimpse into the inner world of the devoted comic book fan.

While working for several years in a comic book store, MRTIM started drawing the more memorable customers and the things that they said. Based on the blog of the same name, and featuring popular entries as well as brand-new cartoons, Our Valued Customers chronicles the lively, witty, and often acerbic opinions and comments of the customers who shop at comic book stores, providing a fascinating glimpse into the inner world of the devoted comic book fan.

Based on eight years of research visiting dozens of startups, tech companies and incumbents, Harvard Business School professor Thales Teixeira shows how and why consumer industries are disrupted, and what established companies can do about it—while highlighting the specific strategies potential startups use to gain a competitive edge. There is a pattern to digital disruption in an industry, whether the disruptor is Uber, Airbnb, Dollar Shave Club, Pillpack or one of countless other startups that have stolen large portions of market share from industry leaders, often in a matter of a few years. As Teixeira makes clear, the nature of competition has fundamentally changed. Using innovative new business models, startups are stealing customers by breaking the links in how consumers discover, buy and use products and services. By decoupling the customer value chain, these startups, instead of taking on the Unilevers and Nikes, BMW’s and Sephoras of the world head on, peel away a piece of the consumer purchasing process. Birchbox offered women a new way to sample beauty products from a variety of companies from the convenience of their homes, without having to visit a store. Turo doesn't compete with GM. Instead, it offers people the benefit of driving without having to own a car themselves. Illustrated with vivid, indepth and exclusive accounts of both startups, and reigning incumbents like Best Buy and Comcast, as they struggle to respond, Unlocking the Customer Value Chain is an essential guide to demystifying how digital disruption takes place – and what companies can do to defend themselves.

Introducing “return on relationship” with your most valued customers The traditional model of growing your business—by relying on employees in sales, marketing, and product development—is dying. Today’s most successful companies are taking a different approach: getting customers to market, sell, and create products for them. In assessing client value, most companies look at the money paid for their goods and services. But in this book, Customer Strategy Group CEO Bill Lee offers a compelling new vision for growth by maximizing your “return on relationship” with select customers—those that offer rich sources of hidden wealth. A different type of ROI, this strategy of making the most of your firm’s existing relationships is a modern approach to customer relations—one that yields a distinct business advantage. Illustrated by numerous case studies—Salesforce.com, SAS Institute, 3M, Microsoft, and others—The Hidden Wealth of Customers shows the value some customers can have by helping to market your offerings, penetrate foreign markets, leverage the demand-generating power of social media, build customer communities, improve innovation, and more. Lee explains how to effectively engage this crucial audience, which has the power to keep your strategy focused on important customer issues and increase profitability. When done right, your best customers will prospect for you while also speeding product adoption and improving customer satisfaction and long-term loyalty. Consider this book a blueprint for finally making the most out of your most valuable customer relationships.

To err is human. To really screw things up takes modern technology. To enjoy reading about the misfortunes of others at the hands of technology...all it takes is this book! In addition to being one of the country's leading technology experts (he's co-authored more than 30 books), Rick Broadhead has had a life-long predilection for stories of the strange-but-true genre. In Dear Valued Customer: You are a Loser, he combines his two abiding passions to present an exhaustive, fascinating, and hysterical collection of technologically enabled blunders, bloopers, and mishaps. Have you heard the story about the bank in Chicago whose computer made overnight multi-millionaires out of hundreds of its account holders? How about the man in California who was informed that he owed 39 trillion dollars in overdue library fines? Or the woman in New York state who claimed she was seeing the names of dead people on her caller-ID box? The Most "F" words in a Disney movie, The Most Embarrassing Open Mike Gaffe by a Politician, The Strangest Discovery by an Airport Metal Detector (a woman discovered she had a surgical retractor in her stomach)..;.these and more than one hundred other bizarre stories will definitely keep readers uproariously enthralled.

The 1990s bring challenges to American business that will require radical new management strategies. The management revolution gathering momentum across the country puts customer value creation as Priority One. Shows you why customer value creation is vital for business success and teaches you how to transform your organization into a high value delivering enterprise. You'll find all the tools and approaches for value creation that give senior executives and top-level managers a reliable road map for strategic change. And you'll learn these techniques and methods from actual case study examples of industry leaders who are now pioneering the new approaches for becoming increasingly valued by their customers.

Superior Customer Value is a state-of-the-art guide to designing, implementing and evaluating a customer value strategy in service, technology and information-based organizations. A customer-centric culture provides focus and direction for an organization, driving and enhancing market performance. By benchmarking the best companies in the world, Weinstein shows students and marketers what it really means to create exceptional value for customers in the Now Economy. Learn how to transform companies by competing via the 5-S framework – speed, service, selection, solutions and sociability. Other valuable tools such as the Customer Value Funnel, Service-Quality-Image-Price (SQIP) framework, SERVQUAL, and the Customer Value/Retention Model frame the reader’s thinking on how to improve marketing operations to create customer-centered organizations. This edition features a stronger emphasis on marketing thinking, planning and strategy, as well as new material on the Now Economy, millennials, customer obsession, business models, segmentation and personalized marketing, customer experience management and customer journey mapping, value pricing, customer engagement, relationship marketing and technology, marketing metrics and customer loyalty and retention. Built on a solid research basis, this practical and action-oriented book will give students and managers an edge in improving their marketing operations to create superior customer experiences.

Time has become a precious commodity, so business leaders who can save their customers' time more effectively than competitors do will win their loyalty. This book shows how it's done. Business survival requires valuing what customers value—and in our overworked and distraction-rich era, customers value their time above all else. Real-time companies beat their rivals by being faster and more responsive in meeting customer needs. To become a real-time company, as top scholars Jerry Power and Tom Ferratt explain, you need a real-time monitoring and response system. They offer detailed advice on how to put procedures in place that will collect data on how well products or services are saving customer time; identify strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities; and specify innovations needed to save even more customer time. Where should leaders look to innovate? Powers and Ferratt say to search every step in the life of a product or service, from development to production to usage. And for each step, they identify four possible levers for innovation: the design of the products or services themselves, the process used to produce them, the data that can be gathered on their use, and the people who make or provide the product or service. The book features dozens of examples of companies that are getting it right and the innovations they used to help their customers save time, all while helping themselves to a hefty slice of market share. This is a comprehensive, authoritative guide to thriving in a revolution that is sweeping every industry and sector.

In today's networked economy, businesses realize they can't go it alone. The most successful companies understand that everyone they do business with is a customer - their vendors, employees, everyone who brings value to the company - and that allocating appropriate resources to those relationships will improve overall performance. Everyone is a Customer outlines methods every company can use to develop and measure "win-win" collaborative relationships versus "win-lose" transaction- based relationships. Readers will learn how to: Redefine every business relationship as a 'customer' relationship; Value, measure and manage every business relationship; and Create new value and improve company performance.