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Customer Insight
Category: Book Reviews
Artificial Unintelligence
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
It’s almost impossible to reconcile the state of AI as depicted in the media and the reality of AI that you encounter in the real world, isn’t it? On the one hand we seem to be just a few years from AI general intelligence that will outperform humans in every way. On the other, I can’t find a machine transcription service that copes with an even moderately-challenging accent.
Fra...
Economics in the Age of COVID-19
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager
When I saw, at the end of April, that MIT Press had published a book on the economics of COVID-19 I was both impressed and alarmed. Impressed by the sheer speed with which all concerned must have acted in order to research, write, and produce (albeit digitally) an entire book in that time.
“This is the fastest we’ve ever moved a book through our system due to the immediacy of the conte...
The Pocket Universal Principles Of Design
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
This little book (it genuinely does fit in the back pocket of a pair of jeans) has a permanent place on my desk, and I’m going to suggest that you should think about putting it on yours as well. It’s one of those books that you can read from cover to cover (pretty quickly), flick through for inspiration, or turn to when you need to remind yourself of something half-remembered.
Who&rsqu...
The Customer Catalyst
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
We’re always on the lookout for new books relevant to our focus on customer experience and insight, particularly ones that are based on a strategy of long-term profitability derived from focusing on the customer.
That strategic focus has been frustratingly rare since the glory days of The Service-Profit Chain and Good to Great etc. Many books about the customer are useful, but take a very ta...
Rituals for Work
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
In the Spring issue of Customer Insight we ran an article about culture change in which Stephen from TLF Research argued that to understand culture we need to learn from anthropology. Culture, then, is best understood not as what we do, but as what the things we do mean to us.
Great, but in practical terms, how do you make those kinds of cultural meanings clear? Rituals for Work argues that one wa...
Customer Success
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
“Customer success” is a bit of a buzzword, but it can be quite hard to pin down exactly what it means and how it differs from existing concepts like customer satisfaction, customer service, or customer focus. How should we define it, and does it have anything new to bring to the party?
This book claims to be the first to introduce customer success to business leaders. Just like the con...
TLF Book Club Retrospective
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
We normally dedicate these pages to a book review, but on the second anniversary of TLF Book Club we thought it might be interesting to take a look back at all 7 of the books we’ve read. Which were our favourites, which had most to teach us, and which should you consider reading if you haven’t already?
01 Predatory Thinking
Dave Trott’s “Predatory Thinking” was our in...
This is Service Design Thinking / This is Service Design Doing
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
I recommend “This is Service Design Thinking” pretty often, but a client reminded me recently that we’ve never actually reviewed it for Customer Insight. It’s time to set that right. Despite being 8 years old, it remains a useful reference for anyone with an interest in service design and, in particular, in the tools of service design. While we’re at it, we’ll a...
Predatory Thinking
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
TLF kicked off its new book club with “Predatory Thinking”, at my suggestion. Distilled from Dave Trott’s distinctively punchy blog posts, this is a book about getting the edge on the competition whatever your walk of life.
I’ve long been a fan of Trott’s ability to use stories to illustrate points he wants to make, as well as his style of writing. The rest of book cl...
Black Box Thinking
By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight
What could that be? The clue is that it’s something to do with ‘Growth Mentality’.........
It’s also the title of Matthew Syed’s new book, just published in September 2015. Matthew is the only keynote speaker who has ever been invited back to TLF’s Customer Experience Conference because the first time round he was given the best ever audience satisfaction score...
Race Against the Machine
By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight
Based at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the authors are respectively Director and Associate Director at the MIT Centre for Digital Business. Both are experts on the rise of the digital economy with Brynjolfsson’s previous book titled ‘Wired for Innovation: How IT is Reshaping the Economy’. Interestingly, their original intention was to write a book about all the worldwide be...
Running With the Kenyans
By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight
Last year I read “Running with The Kenyans” by journalist and runner Adharanand Finn. As an average club runner for 15 years doing middle to long distance road and off road races I, like Finn, was keen to grasp any little shred of insight that might help me to improve my times by maybe getting just 1% closer to running like a Kenyan. I also had a more academic interest. As a lifelong a...
Thinking Fast & Slow
By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight
Over the last decade the popularity of the ‘discipline’ of behavioural economics (like all economics, I hesitate to call it a science), has steadily increased. One reason for this is the readability of its literature, based as it is on interesting behavioural experiments, all of which are like short stories - good at entertaining readers and conference audiences alike. The fact t...
Bounce
By Nigel Hill, Founder of TLF Research and Editor of Customer Insight
‘Talent’ is one of those words that’s defined and interpreted in many different ways, so to start on a definite footing, here are the CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) definitions for ‘talent’ and ‘talent management’:
Talent consists of those individuals who can make a difference to organisational performance either through their imm...
Designing With Data
By Stephen Hampshire, Client Manager, TLF Research
Review in a nutshellExcellent primer on the key principles of accurate and effective data presentation. Useful summary of the graphical toolkit available to designers. Lacks focus on the importance of getting the right data in the first place.
IntroductionData visualisation (dataviz), information design, and infographics are a big trend at the moment. But how many of these "infographics" really a...
Authenticity: What Customers Really Want
By TLF Research
There is growing evidence that today’s affluent customer in developed economies has become more interested in quality of life (doing things) than material wealth (owning things). All the way back to Maslow, studies have shown that once the basic needs of food and shelter are met, extra material wealth does not necessarily lead to greater happiness. Much research has demonstrated that experie...
Drive: The suprising truth about what motivates us
By TLF Research
Motivating people
"FORGET EVERYTHING YOU THOUGHT YOU KNEW ABOUT MOTIVATING PEOPLE - AT WORK, AT SCHOOL, AT HOME. IT’S WRONG."
These are the first words you will read on the inside front cover of the latest offering from Dan Pink, author of ‘A Whole New Mind’. Since managers striving to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty are constantly trying to motivate employees to keep...
The future of competition: Co-creating unique value with customers
By TLF Research
Both professors at Michigan Business School, Prahalad and Ramaswamy may have come up with a very prescient title for their book on co-creation. The book was published in 2004 but the authors actually introduced the concept four years earlier in their Harvard Business Review article ‘Co-opting customer competence’ 2. They are both very eminent in different fields. Ramaswamy is an expert...
Risk: Risk The Science and politics of Fear, Dan Gardner
By TLF Research
It could be argued that we live in unprecedented times. Our life expectancy has doubled even looking back only 100 years. We’re mostly healthier, we have access to more technology and for most of us, despite the current economic climate, we’re better off than countless previous generations. However, we seem to be living in a constant climate of fear if you pay attention to the media, a...
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
By TLF Research
This book dissects customers’ decisionmaking processes particularly their buying behaviour. It provides fascinating insights into the subconscious mechanisms that we’re often unaware of, but which tend to exert a big influence on our decision-making. More importantly, the author, through his research, suggests why most of our decision-making appears to be not just irrational, but predi...
Social Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
By TLF Research
“Emotional Intelligence” sold more than five million copies worldwide. In his new book, Goleman draws on the new science of neuro-sociology to extend his concepts from a business context to the wider world of social relationships. Goleman describes social intelligence (SI) as the interpersonal part of EI and maintains that since most organisations function like a society, SI has fundam...
The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig
By TLF Research
The halo effect is a cognitive bias that affects our judgements. We tend to evaluate people positively across the board or negatively across the board, rather than judging them accurately in different areas. This is why we sometimes believe that rockstars have something interesting to say about climate change.
The halo effect is also a feature of satisfaction measurement—customers or employ...
Citizen Marketers: When people are the message
By TLF Research
“Citizen Marketers – When People Are The Message” is the second title from authors McConnell and Huba dealing with the phenomenon of citizen marketers, where ordinary consumers have a disproportionate impact on the fortunes of businesses, products and services. Although published in 2007, many organisations are still unsure of how to handle the whole ‘social media’ an...
Customer Satisfaction
By TLF Research
There’s certainly been a need for a book that addresses the ‘need-to-know’ areas of Customer Satisfaction Measurement for new and experienced managers alike. Many managers seem to inherit piecemeal Customer Satisfaction Measurement systems when they take on a new role, or just as commonly, they inherit no system at all! Whatever situation you find yourself in, it’s good to ...
The 60 second leader
By TLF Research
Phil seems to have cornered the market in small, excellent value, highly readable management books. The idea with this one is that there are simply far too many books on leadership and management; if you want to have any time left in which to lead, then you can't possibly read all of them. Phil's new book breaks leadership down into 30 key principles, tackling each one in its own short chapter. Th...
The Together Company
By TLF Research
Ray Robertson’s fundamental premise is that many organisations don’t get the best out of their people because they fail miserably when it comes to reward. They take the easy way out, giving people similar “fair” pay increases. They fail to explain how pay is decided, leaving many employees feeling it’s just based on their manager’s whim rather than their own per...
Simply Better
BY TLF Reseearch
All organisations claim that they want to improve customer satisfaction, but they also want to minimise costs. Few get this balance right, focusing on controlling or reducing costs whilst seeking ‘quick wins’ to improve customer satisfaction. According to Barwise and Meehan, the most successful organisations accept that improving customer satisfaction is a long haul not a quick fix, st...
Seven Secrets of Inspired Leaders
By TLF Research
My English teacher used to say that poetry is condensed thought. According to the blurb on the back of the book this is “concentrated leadership juice” which, whilst a slightly disturbing phrase, is pretty accurate. The authors have crammed an immense number of valuable ideas (and real-world experiences) into a very readable format - I managed it in a return train journey to London. Ad...
The Tipping point
By TLF Research
A “Tipping Point” is the moment at which something reaches a critical mass and grows astonishingly quickly. Normally what we’re talking about is social phenomena, and drawing the analogy from the behaviour of diseases they are often referred to as social epidemics. This is an enduring metaphor, as Gladwell points out there are three key similarities:
Contagiousness
Little cau...
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
By TLF Research
If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many should a chart be worth? A good one can summarise thousands of data points and highlight a causal relationship; poor ones can obscure a few simple numbers with meaningless “chartjunk”, adding nothing but confusion and irritation. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, one of Amazon’s books of the century, is essential read...
