Adrian Swinscoe is a customer experience consultant and advisor, and has been growing and developing customer-focused large and small businesses for 20 years. He has previously worked with Shell, FT, The Economist Group and Mowlem, as well as consulting with hundreds of smaller businesses to help them engage with their customers, build their customer retention and improve service.

Publisher's acknowledgements

About the author

Introduction

Part I: The Customer Perspective

1. Attract
Introduction

1. Be at the start of your customer’s journey
2. Don’t interrupt customers
3. Develop trust at a distance
4. Are you being interesting and interested?
5. Trust drives transactions
6. Become part of your customers story
7. Customer behaviour is changing: check your assumptions
8. Data insights are good but immersion and observation are better

2. Engage

Introduction
9. Understand the relationships you have with your customers
10. What it takes to build trust
11. Customers trust people like them
12. To really engage you must be willing to fail
13. Doing what’s right for the customer is often an article of faith
14. How to be more interesting
15. Empathy is key to engagement
16. Bad corporate behaviour impacts customer experience and engagement
17. Innovating around relationships
18. Data, privacy and the impact on customer relationships
19. Design a great customer experience by including your customers
20. People will pay more for better service

3. Serve

Introduction
21. Every customer hates waiting but the experience can be improved
22. Speak my language
23. Nature abhors a vacuum
24. Bad reviews can be good
25. Remove the grit
26. The primacy and recency effect
27. Lots of small changes add up
28. Make it simple
29. Behavioural science and lessons for customer service
30. Identify and deal with silent complaints
31. Consistency in quality and delivery is key
32. A name not a number
33. Make your service proactive
34. Make promises, keep them but you don’t have to beat them
35. Improve your service by making it easy for customers to help each other
36. The longest lasting emotions in customer experience
37. Make sure delivery is not your Achilles' heel
38. Reduce effort
39. Is customer service going to get worse before it gets better?
40. What’s your brand’s customer service persona?

4. Keep

Introduction

41. The hole in the bucket syndrome
42. Differences in perception exist and matter
43. Most loyalty schemes don’t create loyalty
44. Marginal cost but high perceived value
45. Make your customer the hero
46. What drives loyalty?
47. Complaints are key to retention
48. Where you earn loyalty

5. Refer

Introduction
49. If you don’t ask then you won’t get

50. Proactivity drives advocacy too
51. How you can build your own customer referral community

Part II: The Business Perspective
6. Communicate

Introduction
52. Be honest about your surveys and keep them short
53. Always feedback and report on results
54. When’s the best time to survey your customers?
55. Be careful when interpreting data
7. Motivate

Introduction
56. Work hard and be nice to people
57. The link between customer experience and employee engagement
58. Engag