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Customer Experience
Must-read customer experience books for 2024
It’s that time again – we’ve published our 2024 reading (and listening) round-up for CX professionals looking to refresh their expertise and prime their thinking for the year ahead.
Developing and delivering an amazing customer experience isn’t a one-off project; it’s an ongoing, multifaceted process – one that requires knowledge and understanding in a variety of different fields.
Luckily, there’s no shortage of great, up-to-the-minute books, podcasts and reports on the subject, covering cutting-edge thinking on everything from user experience design and omnichannel excellence to employee experience and the drivers of long-term customer loyalty.
But you needn’t wade through hundreds of titles to find the ones worth reading; we’ve done that for you! In our newly updated annual list, we’ve cherry-picked the very best resources in the world of customer experience excellence.
The full list of 2024’s unmissable customer experience books, podcasts and reports is available here, but we’ve also put together a little preview in this post to whet your appetite…
Free eBook: 2024’s essential customer experience books, podcasts and reports
2024 customer experience books: Reading list preview
1. The Service Culture Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Getting Your Employees Obsessed with Customer Service
By: Jeff Toister
Format: Book, Audiobook
Synopsis: In this guide to developing a customer-focused culture, you’ll learn the one thing that forms the foundation of every great culture, what customer-focused companies do differently to engage their employees, and ways to strategically align every facet of your organization with outstanding service.
Why we love it: Full of practical tips and highly readable, The Service Culture Handbook is the
definitive guide to developing a workplace culture that’s truly customer-centric.
2. Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business
By: Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine
Format: Book, Audiobook
Synopsis: Based on 14 years of research by the customer experience leaders at Forrester Research, Outside In offers a complete roadmap to attaining the experience advantage.
Why we love it: What’s that, you say? Customer experience impacts employee experience –
and vice versa? Outside In underlines the importance of getting both CX and EX right in order to
solve everyday problems and ultimately, drive better business outcomes.
3. The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty
By: Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi
Format: Book, Audiobook
Synopsis: Take a journey deep inside the customer experience to reveal what really makes
loyal customers – and what drives disloyalty. In The Effortless Experience, you’ll learn the four key pillars of a
low-effort customer experience, backed by robust data and insights. You’ll also read about
companies that are already using the framework with great results.
Why we love it: This book marries data-driven insights with practical tips and ready-made templates so you can hit the ground running with their proven framework.
Free eBook: 2024’s essential customer experience books, podcasts and reports
Customer experience books from last year’s list
Looking for more ways to build exceptional customer experiences? Our reading list from 2023 was focused on the power of human-centric experiences. Or, in other words: making deeper, more human connections and putting customers first – with insights to help you create meaningful moments no matter what’s happening outside your business.
Here are a few of 2023’s best customer experience books – the titles that’ll help you exceed customer expectations, deliver exceptional customer experiences, and create more satisfied customers.
1. Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know
By Adam Grant
2. Empathy in Action: How to Deliver Great Customer Experiences At Scale
By Tony Bates and Dr. Natalie Petouhoff
For authors Tony Bates and Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, technology and empathy aren’t opposing forces, but a dream team for scaling up relationships between businesses, customers and employees. They break down the ways in which technology can be used to enhance human connection instead of attempting to replace it with unconvincing automatic interactions.
Bates, a leading tech CEO, and Petouhoff, a researcher and CX expert, put forward a framework of listening, understanding, predicting and action that promises to accelerate businesses into a new mindset of customer and employee respect. They draw a clear line between business-centric technologies, which fail to emulate genuine connection, and customer-employee-centric models that scale up the authentic human experience.
3. A Complaint Is A Gift: How To Learn From Critical Feedback And Recover Customer Loyalty
By Janelle Barlow
This powerhouse of a title dives deep into the value of feedback – specifically, negative feedback received by businesses. Sweeping aside the instinct to defend or minimize customer criticism, Janelle Barlow reframes complaints as a form of freely-given market research and a point of connection with unhappy customers. Handled correctly, resolved customer issues can mark the turning point towards future loyalty.
Substantially rewritten for the current business climate, this latest edition reflects the heightened demands of customers and the predominantly online environment in which they consider, buy, review and indeed, complain to businesses.
4. Uncopyable: How To Create An Unfair Advantage Over Your Competition
By Steve Miller
Price, service, product… all these differentiators are destined to eventually be one-upped by the competition, according to Steve Miller. He believes that the key to enduring customer loyalty is to set aside the keeping-up mentality, take the focus off your competitors and concentrate instead on creating a unique relationship. Just as humans form unique bonds with one another, so brands can form what Miller calls ‘Uncopyable Attachments’ with their customers.
How is it done? You’ll have to read the book to find out all the interesting details, but the headlines are that a unique blend of brand, experience, innovation and storytelling lie at the heart of the uncopyable customer experience. ‘Competition breeds conformity’, he says, urging us to step away from watching what everyone else is doing and create something that’s entirely new and unique.
5. Do B2B Better: Drive Growth Through Game-Changing Customer Experience
By Jim Tincher
Customer experience thinking often seems to revolve around the consumer perspective. Jim Tincher’s book shifts the emphasis to the B2B landscape, where customers are fellow businesses. Here, relationships are more complex and the standard of CX tends to lag behind that of the B2C world, meaning there’s plenty of opportunity to make changes that have a big impact on your B2B customers.
Tincher’s book is built around the CX Loyalty Flywheel, a model for B2B CX management that moves businesses from a standing start to a state of continuous improvement, with senior buy-in and ROI helping drive things forward. He developed the model based on his own years of experience and research interviews with hundreds of CX professionals.
…And a few of the classics
1. The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences (Financial Times Series)
By Matt Watkinson
A staple in the industry since 2012, The Ten Principles ditches the jargon and hype to focus on clear, actionable steps any business can take to supercharge its customer experience. It’s a favorite in the business because it’s easy to read and widely applicable, with a slew of real-world examples.
2. The Cult of the Customer: Create an Amazing Customer Experience That Turns Satisfied Customers Into Customer Evangelists
By Shep Hyken
Shep Hyken understands that truly positive customer experiences are the ones that have been designed with them at the heart of every decision. This guide explores how to do exactly that, taking customers on a five-stage journey from uncertainty to amazement.
3. The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact
By Dan Heath and Chip Heath
The Heath brothers are powerhouses in the industry, with a string of best-seller customer experience books under their belts. The Power of Moments explores the importance of individual interactions – how one memorable moment can create a lifelong customer, and how to transform your CX to deliver those incredible, memorable instances.
Free eBook: 2024’s essential customer experience books, podcasts and reports