Is your customer experience making you money? Costing you money? Do you know? Like a line of falling dominos, daily actions across your organization form a sequence of events that, if aligned correctly, build momentum and culminate in what every business wants-outstanding financial performance. Establishing a target customer experience-your front domino-to drive daily decisions within your organization will determine the fluidity of that chain of events, and the level of profit outcome you achieve. Companies that use a target customer experience as their front domino reap the biggest rewards in profitability, growth and sustainability. For the first time, a book about customer experience belongs in the management and finance sections of every bookstore. This how-to volume, rich with practical exercises, provides a tested blueprint for defining the target customer experience and translating it into an actionable strategy that will lead to tangible financial reward.
Linda Ireland is co-owner and partner of Aveus LLC, a global strategy and operational change firm that helps leaders find money in the business performance chain while improving customer experiences.
As author of Domino: How to use Customer Experience to Tip Everything in Your Business Toward Better Financial Performance, Linda delivers real-life, actionable, how-to help for leaders of any organization. Built on years of experience as a corporate executive, work at Aveus and supported by two rounds of national leader research, Domino is the first how-to book on the topic and proves the link between customer experience and financial performance. Previously, Linda wrote THEM: The Handy Experience Manual with Aveus partner Chris LaVictoire Mahai.
Linda found her passion for emerging growth and turnaround situations early. She was 28 in her first executive role, leading manufacturing for a sole source supplier for 3M through 4X revenue growth and the transformation to Lean operations. In nine years at Deluxe Corporation she did strategy and corporate development to diversify the company away from checks in the late '80's, then led groups in product development, marketing, operations and venture start-up.
At PaperDirect, Linda expanded distribution in global markets, and then helped restructure the business to improve profitability by 200%. At Genesis Direct, Linda helped take the acquisition roll-up, multi-channel retail company public.
Linda was vice president of marketing for Digital River, a global Web commerce services provider and one of the first to achieve sustainability in the Internet space. Linda met Aveus when she was VP and general manager of Wilsons Leather Direct, a division of the $600 million apparel and accessories retailer.
Linda has served on several boards, including Menttium Corporation, Hennepin Theatre Trust and Community Health Charities America. She is an active angel investor, and is a member of the Women Business Leaders in the Health Care Industry Foundation.
In 2009, Linda created Customer Experience for Profit (www.ceforprofit.com) with Aveus. The site aims to dispel the myth that customer experience is a tradeoff to profitability, and to connect a community of leaders putting this lesson to work.
Linda enjoys speaking to audiences about using customer experience to drive financial performance, making it both doable and exciting. She has been featured in the San Francisco Examiner and on business radio shows across the country. She holds two Bachelor of Arts degrees from the University of Minnesota and an MBA from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, where she teaches in the graduate school.
Away from it all? Linda is a wanderer. 30 countries and six continents, she is energized by the deeper perspective that comes with a change of people and place.
