The Customer Experience Edge: Technology and Techniques for Delivering an Enduring, Profitable, and Positive Experience to Your Customers

Globalization and advanced technologies have given ever greater power to the person who decides if your business will succeed or fail--the customer. Whether your company serves consumers or other businesses, you can no longer compete on price and quality alone. To gain profits and market share, you have to deliver an experience that makes customers want to come back--and that sets you apart from the competition. You need to seize The Customer Experience Edge.

Drawing on over sixty years of experience in shaping customer centric strategies and technologies for leading companies, three innovators bring you practical and proven ways to create your customer experience programs and overall business strategies. The key is to strike a balance between programs that are effective but prohibitively expensive and programs that fail to dedicate enough resources to be effective. In the middle ground lie the tools that everyone overlooks--foundational and disruptive technologies. These are the authors' main fields of expertise, and these are what make the customer experience profitable.

The Customer Experience Edge explains how to combine strategy, leadership, organizational change, and technology to:

• Develop products and services that are highly valued by customers
• Form bonds that keep clients from turning to competitors
• Transform customers into your best advocates

It's a new world of business, and customers are keenly aware that their loyalty is valuable currency. The Customer Experience Edge gives you a cost-effective, sustainable way to provide an unforgettable experience that builds loyalty and turns it into real, measurable profits.

About the Authors

Reza Soudagar has more than two decades of experience in business consulting, IT strategy, and the development of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions. He held senior leadership positions at Accenture and Oracle, serving clients in high-tech and communications industries, and was responsible for a number of products in Oracle’s CRM suite. Currently, Reza is an executive in SAP’s global marketing unit and focuses on customer experience. Reza has a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and completed an executive education program at Harvard Business School.

Vinay Iyer brings more than 20 years of experience as an engineer, product manager, sales and business development manager, and marketer to this book. He currently is the Vice President of Global Marketing at SAP.

Prior to joining SAP, Vinay held roles in product marketing and product management for over five years at Siebel Systems in the United States and in Europe. He is a frequent speaker at customer engagement conferences and is now championing SAP’s rapid growth in the market in the overall customer experience management space. Vinay has a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and an MBA from the Wharton Business School.

Dr. Volker G. Hildebrand has two decades of experience as an expert on CRM as a researcher, author, professor, and software industry professional. With a doctorate in business economics, an MBA from the University of Mannheim, and a degree in business and technology from the University of Stuttgart, Volker has been an instructor and pioneering researcher on how to optimize the relationship between a customer and its suppliers. In addition, he has been a CRM consultant for large international companies and held various leadership positions at SAP in sales, marketing, and product management for CRM and e-commerce applications. Volker is currently Vice President for CRM Solutions at SAP.

Volker is the author of several books and more than 100 articles on CRM. Database Marketing & Computer Aided Selling was published in 1993, and his articles have appeared in many journals: the German edition of the Harvard Business Review, absatzwirtschaft (Germany’s leading sales and marketing journal), and the CRM Project, HMD, Marketing ZFP, and SAP Insider journals.