Customers Included: How to Transform Products, Companies, and the World – With a Single Step
By Mark Hurst and Phil Terry

Head: (4 out of 5)
Heart: (3 out of 5)
Leadership Applicability: (5 out of 5)

The book’s title, Customers Included, states the obvious:  a customer-inclusive approach to innovation is essential to improving the odds of success.  While many companies aspire to become customer-centric, others fail to include customers altogether, due to beliefs about the role of customers in innovation, a lack of time, or know how, among others.

Though the process of including customers is challenging, authors Mark Hurst and Phil Terry, pioneers in the field of customer experience, aim to change that with easy-to-read content organized around the three basic steps for including them:

1. Observe customers directly.
2. Discover customers’ key unmet needs.
3. Build consensus across the organization to meet those needs.

Peppered with real stories of product failures to illustrate key points associated with omitting customers from innovation (and product successes due to including them), the authors provide practical tips for a strategic, customer-inclusive approach to innovation.

Leaders who want to create a better product, service or experience for their customers – whether or not the customer is a shopper, a user, a student, a patient, a citizen, an employee – will want to read this book. Buy it now.