Customers notoriously struggle to describe what they want.

Customer experience expert, Chip Bell, weaves entertaining stories and helpful suggestions into a practical guide to getting inside your customer's head. This valuable information is the key to unlocking great ideas that become new products, service, and solutions.

In our interview, Bell tells some fun stories about a pizza company re-thinking the pizza box, a hotel general manager holding focus groups with taxi drivers, a pharmaceutical company learning the secret to keeping patients in clinical trials, and many more examples that go beyond traditional voice of customer tactics.

Adam Toporek, has a unique definition of heroism.

When it comes to serving customers, being a hero means being there when a customer needs you.

His book is a practical guide that helps frontline employees deliver “hero class” customer service in everyday situations.

In our interview, Toporek explains how you don’t have to wait for extraordinary situations to be a hero. There are opportunities to be a hero to your customer in nearly every interaction.

Delighting customers is not the goal.

That’s counterintuitive advice shared by customer experience expert and bestselling author, Matthew Dixon. It’s a perspective that’s backed by research.

“Customers who are surprised and delighted are no more loyal than customers whose expectations are simply met,” says Dixon. A better way to create loyal customers is to reduce the amount of effort required for customers to do business with you.

In our interview, Dixon shares four ways to reduce customer effort.

How do you create an amazing customer experience?

New York Times bestselling author, Shep Hyken, charts a clear path in the new edition of his classic book.

The book outlines five stages, or “cults,” that customers pass through. The first is a “cult of uncertainty,” where customers never know exactly what to expect.

Companies that offer a “cult of amazement,” create experiences that are “consistently above average.”

In our interview, Hyken explains why the word “cult,” is not a bad word, and why going for “wow” isn’t practical.

Customer Experience pioneer, Jeanne Bliss, introduces the “Make Mom Proud” standard for looking at customer experience.

The concept is that if you wouldn’t subject your mother to a poor experience, you shouldn’t be doing it to your customers.

The book full of real examples and great advice.

Bliss is entertaining and insanely helpful in this video interview, where she breaks down exactly what you need to do to get your CEO to care about customer experience.

Customer experience expert, Annette Franz, has put together a practical guide to improving customer experience.

The book covers three big topics:

• Listening to customers

• Creating customer personas

• Customer journey mapping

It’s an essential toolkit for creating a customer experience program.

In this video, Franz joined me to discuss how journey mapping is essential to elevating the customer experience.

Max Yoder is the CEO of Lessonly, a company that provides easy-to-use training software. Yoder’s book shares practical tips and insights he learned as an entrepreneur that can help you do better work in a company or team.

The chapters are short and story-driven, so it’s easy to pick up quick tips you can use immediately.

In this interview with Yoder, we discuss how you can improve individual or team performance by focusing on what’s working.

Elisabeth Swan thinks about process a lot.

She's the managing partner of GoLeanSixSigma.com, a company that provides Lean Six Sigma training and certification.

Swan co-authored The Problem-Solver’s Toolkit with Tracy O’Rourke to provide a resource guide full of easy-to-use process improvement tools.

In this interview, Swan shares a technique called “swimlane mapping” that can prevent customer service issues from falling through the cracks.

Customer Experience expert, Shaun Belding, wrote The Journey to Wow as a parable.

It’s a surprisingly effective way to help readers understand key customer experience concepts such as journey mapping, customer feedback, and the importance of working across functions.

Most important, you’ll discover that customer experience is more than just another name for customer service.

In this conversation, Belding shares advice for getting executives to buy-in to customer experience initiatives.

Customer service speaker and trainer, Randi Busse, is focused on employee ownership.

She’s created two personas, Rant and Rave, the highlight two types of employees we see in nearly every business. Rants are just collecting a paycheck and are disinterested in great work. Raves act and think like owners, and go out of their way to take care of customers.

In our interview, Busse explains how customer service leaders and small business owners influence employees to either become a Rant or a Rave.