Customer Reviews

Domino: How Customer Experience Can Tip Everything in Your Business toward Better Financial Performance

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If I could choose only one book to help improve my business or my career, Domino would be it! This book is an all-in-one. It is more than a road map for understanding and improving customer experience. Linda Ireland's principles can be used as a framework for starting a business or applied to individuals in the job market to build personal brand. This book provides critical exercises for understanding your customer and how to position yourself for success - both from a business standpoint and a personal perspective.

As a customer service manager, I found this book to be illuminating and very useful. Clearly written with an elegant simplicity, it contains great information and insight for every level of an organization. Re-defining our customer experience by using Ireland's target customer experience model -- and then holding that sacred -- has made work decisions easier by providing us the "outside-in" perspective that builds loyal customers who will be promoters for our brand and products. I recommend this book!

I like the notion of thinking through the customer's product/service lifecycle in terms of customer experience: Customers realize a certain need, and then evaluate and aquire a product/service to satisfy the need; finally, they arrive at an evaluation of whether/how well the product/service satisfied the original need and then the need evolves into another need. I agree with other reviewers that it's a no-nonsense book with a solid approach to thinking through a business (problem) from the buyer's point of view.

However, my assumption would be that most people reading this book are already familiar with textbooks like Kotler's Marketing Management (13th Edition) (e.g. 11th ed., chapter 7) or Solomon's Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being, 6th Edition and are thus also already familiar with purchase decision models (or buyer behavior models in general) - and for them, the ideas in this book could be condensed to a set of probably 40 questions that need to be asked from a customer experience perspective.

Although these questions are very smart, I wouldn't dare writing (and charging for) a whole book to spread them. In my view, this is more blog material than book material - and the book certainly looks more like an apprentice's first try at bookmaking than a professional publisher's work; it would have helped if Aveus LLC did not publish it itself, I presume.

By the way: Ireland's definition of customer experience ("... what happens and how customers feel..." when they move through the cycle mentioned above), in my opinion, misses an important point: An experience is something that gets stored in the customer's brain (facts, feelings, ... associated to products, services, companies, ...; consciously or not), affecting her (future) behavior. "What happens" does not necessarily have to affect the customer in any way (other than using up the company's money for something they had better spent on improving the customer's experience).
Companies try to influence customers' behavior on time scales of seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, and even years. They must not only manage "what happens" and try to make "customers feel" during their interactions, they must, above all, worry about what gets stored (again, consciously or not) in customers' brains. This will shape their (future) behavior towards the company - as experiences with other vendors shape their behavior towards other vendors. I believe memory is a fundamental concept for customer experience, and Ireland misses it in her definition (although it seems to appear several times throughout the book).

Ireland lays everything out in a common sense, practical approach that skillfully illustrates the "cause and effect" of actions taken that can add or detract from the profitability a company needs to expand their market share. She makes the point convincingly that a superior customer experience and increased profitability are not mutually exclusive. She provides the reader with key learning experiences that will show you how to use those positive experiences as the backbone of a strategy to increase profits and sustain growth. She asks the right questions that challenge the reader to reexamine their current strategy and perhaps think afresh about the true role of customer experience and the vital but often undervalued linkage to bottom-line profitability.

I can hear the author's positive and encouraging "voice" coming right through the text.

The concepts were useful. Great organization: For example the outline of the purpose (realize a need, learn, try, buy, solve, evolve) is clear, understandable and usable throughout (I like the arrow diagram).

I could take-it-or-leave-it on the exercises: For me, I was lazy: I.e., I did the reading but not the exercises.
I was just anxious to get through all the topics and hear the commentary. But I can see how the excercises are useful to "work in" the concepts. So for many: the excercises will be great and of added value.

What did I like the best? The practical nature of the discussion and theory. I intend to read through it again a second time.

Domino is a valuable and practical approach to building and maintaining customer relationships. I really like the methodical approach to the process. I found it very easy to extract concepts and then apply in manageable segments with my team.

The book helped me think of many valuable ways to service my customers. Well worth reading.

Alan Kipust

This book takes the discussion around the buzz word "customer experience" to a more strategic level. Much of what has already been written about customer experience frames it around the role it plays in brand perception and product/service performance. Ireland has done what hasn't been done before. She gives a practical how-to guide for leaders wanting to understand the strategic and financial impact of customers' perceptions of their experience with their companies. With this strategic understanding of "what problem you're solving" for customers, she lays out a framework that identifies, prioritizes, and focuses operational steps that will achieve better results. The ideal customer experience becomes the target to drive real performance. I've only had the book three weeks and its pages are already dog-earred, flagged, and marked up like a well- worn classic.

This book really does a fabulous job of illustrating the importance of an authentic customer experience. It is clear and concise and chock full of relevant information, great stories and creative ideas about how to create a business that really prospers.

You can tell from reading DOMINO that Linda Ireland possesses a wealth of experience that spans positions and fields alike. We live in an experience economy today - if you're not focused on the best experience you should be!

I have never come across a book like DOMINO before. It really pushes the idea that customer experience needs to stop being relegated to sales and marketing divisions and must instead be used in every single division of your organization and at every level to achieve success. The worksheets in it are incredibly helpful. If you are a business leader, regardless of your industry, you need this book.