We can get quick answers to any of our queries with a few touches on our smartphones in today’s times. Literally, we are roaming around with all the information in our little pockets. But, if you want to develop a deep understanding of a topic, a few hundred words blog articles cannot do justice. You need to get absorbed in a well-written book by an authoritative person in that field for learning purposes.

Here, we have made a well-curated list of top-25 books to help you learn the nitty-gritty of Customer Experience. These books written by expert authors in the CX industry will guide you as a mentor in developing a customer-centric culture in your organization. So, let’s get started!

1. Customer Understanding: Three ways to put ‘customer’ in Customer experience” (and at the heart of your business)

By Annette Franz

This book should be a must on your book shelf as it brings home the pertinence of Customer Experience (CX) and gives business a roadmap for getting it right. When you put your customer at the heart of everything, you tend to understand a customer better, delve into their surveys and data, personas, and route through their journey mapping.

2. The Amazement Revolution: Seven Customer Service Strategies to Create an Amazing Customer (and Employee) Experience

By Shep Hyken

You must stop treating customer service as a department. This book walks you through seven such powerful strategies that show customer service from a holistic note and any organization can implement to create greater customer and employee loyalty. If you are someone who is keen to know more about the nitty-griity’s of customer service as a subject and how customer experience plays a pivotal role, this should be your go-to.

3. Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media

By Dan Gingiss

It is no surprise that Social media has changed customer service time and again. It has shifted power from brands to consumers, requiring a different way of thinking about customer engagement. This book is all about blending the pertinence of customer care along with customer experience and giving the readers a few takeaways for life. This must be on your shelf if you wish to learn how brands create engaging experiences on social media.

4. Inside Your Customer’s Imagination: 5 Secrets for Creating Breakthrough Products, Services, and Solutions

By Chip R Bell

This book is a jewel in the customer experience niche. Reading through this book will teach you how co-creation partnerships enable you to tap into the treasure trove of ideas, ingenuity, and genius-in-the-raw within every customer. Not just that, you will also come across some real-life examples from organizations like McDonald’s, DHL, Marriott, Lockheed Martin, Discover Financial, Ultimate Software, and many more, that portrays the secrets of bringing out stellar services and solutions.

5. The Customer Rules: The 39 Essential Rules for Delivering Sensational Service

By Lee Cockerell

This book will walk you through 39 digestible, bite-sized chapters, and all about forming an environment that keeps customers coming back for more. Not only that, this book will also teach you why the customer always rules, and also the rules for serving customers so well they’ll never want to do business with anyone but you. Yes, it is possible and doable, you just need to know how to do it the right way as is explained in this book.

6. Mapping Experiences

By Jim Kalbach

This is yet another hand-picked book on customer experience. Read on to know how to visually map your existing customer experience, based on user research, and demonstrate how and where customer perspectives intersect with business goals. Using various mapping techniques from UX design, you’ll learn how to turn customer observations into actionable insight for product design.

7. The Guaranteed Customer Experience – How To Customer By Keeping Your Promises

By Jeff Toister

This book will walk you through the tips on how to get a customer attracted to your business and not churn out. Although we all know that some amount of churn is inevitable, but keeping it at a minimum point is the key which has been well-taught by this book. Furthermore, it encompasses the entire customer journey to promise an experience that never falls short of expectations.

8. Be our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service

By Theodore Kinni

Disney lovers in the house, this one is for you. If you wish to know how one of those backstage and onstage experiences, or how cast members, employees are hired and the best of the world-class customer satisfaction is delivered, this is a must on your book shelf. Not just that, this book will also teach you more on restoring relationships with customers.

9. Uplifting Service

By Ron Kaufman

Buckle up as you get into a new world of service that is guided by fundamental principles and actionable models. This will teach you how the architecture that is applied to build an uplifting service culture is the same, even though you may face different teams across the globe. In the end of the day, it is all about giving the customers the best of customer experience with uplifted service that keeps them satisfied and retained.

10. Gamestorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers

By Dave Gray and Sunni Brown

If you have been wondering how to go from book theory to concrete ideas to real implementation at your company, you must read this one to unlock your answers. This book brings fun to brainstorming and offers a way to enhance creativity in your company and breakthrough with new ideas. You will find value in the nearly 100 different games, some of which you’ve seen before, and others you probably haven’t. The book also includes information on how to lead through each game.

11. The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty

By Matthew Dixon Nick Towan and Rick Delisi

The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty is a CX book packed with insightful guidance by three experts – Matthew Dixon, Nick Towan, and Rick Delisi. The authors have written this book after extensive research and study about ‘customer loyalty.’ The authors reveal that “most customers don’t want to be wowed; they want an effortless experience.” The book takes the readers on a fascinating journey to customer experience and shows what makes a customer loyal or disloyal. Not only have the writers provided the readers with principle-based knowledge, but they have also given tools and templates that any business can start using right away to improve their customer experience and overall business performance.

12. What Customers Crave: How to Create Relevant and Memorable Experiences at Every Touchpoint

By Nicholas Webb

Customer experience has developed into a very big topic today. If you feel overwhelmed with complex explanations and systems relating to customer experience, this book, written by author and business strategist Nicholas Webb, will feel like a cool breeze. The author has simplified the topic of understanding your customer in mere two points – What do your customers love? What do they hate? The contents of the book are simple and direct, just like the title of the book. You will get to understand your customers’ expectations and how to fulfil those expectations to create a relevant and memorable experience for them. The book is full of tools and examples to make things easier for you to understand and implement. The author promises to enable you with the knowledge to motivate your customers “not only to bring their own wallet but also of their friends.”

13. The Customer of the Future: 10 Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow’s Business

By Blake Morgan

The author Blake Morgan is considered a ‘customer experience futurist.’ She is not simply concerned about the expectations of today’s customers but keeps an eye on the changing patterns of expectations to predict the future of customer experience. In this book of hers, she provides the readers with ten guiding principles to win customers in the future. If you want to build a future-proof business, you need to read this book. The book is equipped with some amazing new techniques to shift the entire business from being product-focused to being customer-focused. You will also get some case studies and examples of successful innovative companies offering compelling customer experiences.

14. The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences

By Matt Watkinson

This book by Matt Watkinson is written for everyone, including leaders, managers, professionals, and consultants, whoever has a stake in any business and has decision-making powers. The book provides ten principles applicable to every business for making real-world changes in customer experience. The book says that you need to pay attention to customer experience because customers are powerful, have a loud voice, and wealth of choices. Another great thing about the book is that it provides ideas that are neither complicated nor cost a fortune to be implemented. It tells that you can enhance customer experiences in easy and low-cost ways.

15. Winning Her Business – How to Transform the Customer Experience for the World’s Most Powerful Consumers

By Bridget Brennan

Bridget Brennan is CEO of Female Factor, and she has written this book based on her experience. In this book, she has shared the secret of appealing to the most powerful consumer, i.e., women. In this book, she says that when businesses focus on the market share, they usually forget that women are the driving force behind 70-80% of consumer spending. She has provided ‘The Four Motivator Framework’ to make customers feel connected, inspired, confident, and appreciated in this book. The book is full of examples of companies succeeding by focusing on women as consumers. The book promises increased sales, referrals, and repeat business.

16. CX Trinity: Customers, Content, and Context: Musings and Observations on the Evolving Customer Experience

By Alan J. Porter

As the name suggests, CX trinity talks about three key facets of consumer experience – how we talk to customers, the content we provide to them, and the context in which they consume our content. Alan J. Porter says that any good customer experience is driven by three essential elements – customer’s need, content, and context. However, this book is not written like a traditional CX guidebook. It is, in fact, a collection of 52 essays containing Alan’s experiences over the years. Alan has wide experience in writing, designing, and managing content for both small and large organizations.  

17. Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Customer Alignment Through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams

By James Kalbach

Mapping Experiences, written by James Kalbach, is an interesting read for those businesses that cannot pinpoint the problem with their customer experience system. The book gives a visual method to map existing customer experience and envision future solutions based on that. The book shows that mapping and diagramming skills are not useful only for product and service designing. It can be used effectively in customer experience strategies too.

18. The Customer Experience Dictionary: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About CX

By Ben Phillips

While reading about customer experience, you must have come across numerous terms that demand concrete definitions. Ben Phillips has written this book to solve this issue only. As the name suggests, the book contains hundreds of terms used in the CX industry along with their explanation, acronym, and references. The terms have not only been defined but explained with examples. It also contains the best CX practices, market research methodologies, and technological innovations in the industry. You can view this book not only as a dictionary but as an encyclopedia, glossary, and guidebook for all your CX needs.  

19. Transform Customer Experience: How to Achieve Customer Success and Create Exceptional CX

By Isabella Villani

If you need a step-by-step guide for planning and executing customer experience strategy,  this book can help. It offers real-life insights into creating effective strategies and implementing the same in any kind of organization ranging from corporate to government to non-profit organizations. It provides solutions to real-life issues like addressing dimensions of diversity in the customer base. Further, the book also deals with the topic of creating positive employees experience to build the culture of good customer experience in the organization.

20. Customer Empathy: A radical intervention in customer experience management and design

By Alex Allwood

Alex Allwood has come up with a remarkably interesting twist in customer experience. The author writes about utilizing the least-utilized and one of the most powerful elements of human resource – customer empathy. Alex has outlined her own framework, methods, and tools to use customer empathy to solve the common issues in customer experiences. Not only this, but she also shows that customer empathy can be utilized to solve many management problems like low organizational commitment, poor alignment between cross-functional teams, and competing agendas and priorities. Customer empathy helps leaders to see customers’ worlds differently, and this book will help you see CX differently.

21. The Four CX Pillars to Grow Your Business Now: The Customer Experience Manager Playbook

By Adrian L. Brady-Cesana

The book ‘The Four CX Pillars’ is filled with Adrian’s 10+ years of experience building, leading, and scaling venture capital-backed start-up companies. He has based all his works on the four pillars of the CX – Team. Tool, Process, and Feedback. This book suits the need of start-ups and businesses that are scaling and growing their business.

22. Customer Experience Management Field Manual: The Guide For Building Your Top Performing CX Program

By Jeff Sheehan

This book, written by Jeff Sheehan, is a manual and practical guide for starting a new customer experience management program or improving an existing one. This well-researched book talks about eight-core CX functions detailed in separate chapters. The concepts provided in the book can be implemented on organizations of any size and scale. The book sees customer experience as an outcome-focused business operation. If you need a detailed book and manual to learn and implement every aspect of CX in your business, this book will help you a lot.

23. Ignore Your Customers (and They’ll Go Away): The Simple Playbook for Delivering the Ultimate Customer Service Experience

By Micah Solomon

Micah Solomon has written this interesting book that provides step-by-step procedures of crafting a customer service culture and building customer experience so powerful that they can transform any organization and boost its bottom line. The book makes an interesting read as it tells behind the curtain stories of customer experience management programs of various successful businesses like Zappos, Virgin, Amazon, Cleveland Clinic, Drybar, and many more.

24. Getting Service Right: Overcoming the Hidden Obstacles to Outstanding Customer Service

Jeff Toister, in his book Getting Service Right, talks about the details of the roles of employees in providing a good customer experience. This book does not give you any tips for designing your customer experience. Rather it tells you  your existing system’s pain points that work as obstacles for good customer service. It gives you the reason why your employees fail to ygive a good customer experience constantly. The book is packed with examples from well-known organizations, the latest scientific research in the industry, and real stories from frontline employees.

25. Re-humanize Your Business – How Personal Videos Accelerate Sales and Improve Customer Experience

This book written by Ethan Beute and Stephen Pacinelli explains the different ways to effectively improve relationships and results with your customers, prospects, employees, and recruits by adding personal videos to emails, message texts, and social media messages. The book explains every aspect of embedding visual content in place of the old way of typed content. It explains how personal videos give a personal touch to your business and help customers feel connected as humans. Yes, the book is all about re-humanizing your business.

The growing role of customer experience in an organization

Customer experience is the magnet that attracts brand loyalty and growth to a business. And a business can ensure to provide a good customer experience by providing services that exceed customers’ expectations. An organization that offers frictionless service to their customer wins customers’ trust and loyalty. In today’s time, it has become even more important because customers have numerous options.They have the power of social media to spread feedback, either positive or negative, like a forest fire.

According to a study by Brand Keys, a 7% loyalty increase boosts the lifetime profit of an organization by 85% per customer, and a 3% loyalty increase leads to a cost reduction by 10%. These statistics are enough to show the importance of customer experience in an organization in concrete terms.

Parting Thoughts

Books are always fun to read and explore. We hope that our list on the top 10 customer experience books has given you enough ideas to pick a book from. If you are into all things customer experience, most of these books must be placed in your shelves before they run out of stock.

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