This book will help you put customers at the center of what you do, and in turn, grow your business. For any business to thrive, random initiatives in customer experience (CX) must evolve into a strategic, cohesive plan that accelerates growth and innovation. Traditionally, crafting a CX transformation strategy has been complex and time-intensive, often leading to it being overlooked. CX Wheel simplifies the creation of a comprehensive CX strategy by distilling the key elements of CX onto a single-page, actionable CX transformation plan. CX Wheel lays out a road-tested, how-to CX transformation roadmap comprising 12 distinct steps across four pivotal phases (4As), systematically encapsulated in a single-page ASPIRE phase sets the tone for your future efforts. Here, the focus is on fostering customer obsession, unifying around customers, crafting a forward-looking CX vision, and formulating a robust CX strategy.The AWARE phase lays the groundwork of your CX program by collecting valuable data by listening to customers, and uncovering insights and opportunities for enhancing your customer experience.The ACT phase is where your strategic planning meets execution. You begin to formulate solutions based on your insights, implement them across your customer touchpoints journeys, and measure their impact.The ADVANCE phase widens your focus to incorporate organization, employees, and technology in your CX transformation. This phase solidifies your company's commitment to delivering superior CX and sets the pace for your ongoing journey.This comprehensive guide provides a customer-centered foundation that unifies the organization around customers and the delivery of positive experiences. It will lead you, step-by-step, to successful CX implementation, transforming your customer interactions into strategic business growth.The book also serves as a helpful study guide for those preparing for the Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) exam. It reinforces your understanding of CX principles and provides a contextual backdrop to the theoretical knowledge required to pass the CCXP exam.Whether you're just starting out with a new business, are an experienced entrepreneur, hold a position as a CX professional, or are looking to introduce the CX concept to your organization in another capacity, the 1-page CX Wheel is the easiest and fastest way to create a CX plan that will put customers at the center of your business to propel your business forward on the path to long-term success.

A Today Show #ReadwithJenna Book Club Pick A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help us start anew. It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamt of coming for years―she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she's here without him. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe―which makes it that much more surprising when the women can’t stop confiding in each other. In turns uproariously, absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach's The Wedding People is a look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined―and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. The story is told by Cyril’s son Danny, as he and his older sister, the brilliantly acerbic and self-assured Maeve, are exiled from the house where they grew up by their stepmother. The two wealthy siblings are thrown back into the poverty their parents had escaped from and find that all they have to count on is one another. It is this unshakable bond between them that both saves their lives and thwarts their futures. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House is a dark fairy tale about two smart people who cannot overcome their past. Despite every outward sign of success, Danny and Maeve are only truly comfortable when they’re together. Throughout their lives, they return to the well-worn story of what they’ve lost with humor and rage. But when at last they’re forced to confront the people who left them behind, the relationship between an indulged brother and his ever-protective sister is finally tested.

Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country's vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of the powerful businessman Mr. Hosokawa. Roxane Coss, opera's most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, a moment of great beauty, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different continents become compatriots, intimate friends, and lovers.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea is the hugely anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, one of the best-loved and best-selling fantasy novels of the past decade. Featuring gorgeous orange sprayed edges! A magical house. A secret past. A summons that could change everything. Arthur Parnassus lives a good life built on the ashes of a bad one. He’s the master of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six dangerous and magical children who live there. Arthur works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. He is not alone: joining him is the love of his life, Linus Baker, a former caseworker in the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. And there’s the island’s sprite, Zoe Chapelwhite, and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will do anything to protect the children. But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve. And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home—one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name that Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from—Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart. Welcome back to Marsyas Island. This is Arthur’s story. Somewhere Beyond the Sea is a story of resistance, lovingly told, about the daunting experience of fighting for the life you want to live and doing the work to keep it.

"I live for the dream that my children will be born free," she says. "That they will be what they like. That they will own the land their father gave them." "I live for you," I say sadly. Eo kisses my cheek. "Then you must live for more." Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class. Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity's overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society's ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies... even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Starling House, Alix E. Harrow, comes a moving and genre-defying adventure through time – as a reluctant lady knight and a not-so-heroic-historian will fight through time and space to rewrite their tragic fates . . . and finally reveal the truths hidden beneath the greatest legend ever told. It begins where it ends: beneath the yew tree – a girl not yet a knight, and a boy without a story. It is where she pulls a sword from the heartwood and becomes a legend. And it is where, more than a thousand years later, he will find her – and lose her – and find her – and lose her again. It is where a new story will be written – but whose will it be?

A gorgeous memoir about the sudden end to a seemingly happy marriage—an aching, love-filled, and transcendent account of surviving betrayal and discovering joyOn a chilly day in early spring, Belle Burden’s husband of twenty years announced, with no prior warning, that he was leaving her. Belle was shocked; he had always been a committed partner and a devoted father to their three children. She thought they were in love. She thought he—they—were living the life they'd always professional success, summers at their beloved beachside home, a vibrant social life. But overnight, her caring, steady husband became a man she hardly recognized. He exited his life with her like an actor shrugging off a costume.In Strangers, Belle revisits her marriage, searching for clues that her husband was not who she always thought he was. As she examines her relationship through a new lens, she reckons with her own family history and the lessons she intuited about how a woman is expected to behave in the face of betrayal. Through all of it, she is transformed. The discreet, compliant woman she once was—someone whose nickname was “Belle the Good”—gives way to someone braver, someone determined to use her voice.With unflinching honesty and profound grace, Burden charts a path through heartbreak to show the power of a woman who refuses to give up on love and rediscovers trust in herself. Strangers is a stunning, deeply moving, compulsively readable memoir heralding the arrival of a thrilling new literary talent.

Somewhere Beyond the Sea is the hugely anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, one of the best-loved and best-selling fantasy novels of the past decade. Featuring gorgeous orange sprayed edges! A magical house. A secret past. A summons that could change everything. Arthur Parnassus lives a good life built on the ashes of a bad one. He’s the master of a strange orphanage on a distant and peculiar island, and he hopes to soon be the adoptive father to the six dangerous and magical children who live there. Arthur works hard and loves with his whole heart so none of the children ever feel the neglect and pain that he once felt as an orphan on that very same island so long ago. He is not alone: joining him is the love of his life, Linus Baker, a former caseworker in the Department In Charge of Magical Youth. And there’s the island’s sprite, Zoe Chapelwhite, and her girlfriend, Mayor Helen Webb. Together, they will do anything to protect the children. But when Arthur is summoned to make a public statement about his dark past, he finds himself at the helm of a fight for the future that his family, and all magical people, deserve. And when a new magical child hopes to join them on their island home—one who finds power in calling himself monster, a name that Arthur worked so hard to protect his children from—Arthur knows they’re at a breaking point: their family will either grow stronger than ever or fall apart. Welcome back to Marsyas Island. This is Arthur’s story. Somewhere Beyond the Sea is a story of resistance, lovingly told, about the daunting experience of fighting for the life you want to live and doing the work to keep it.

A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from a “lit world phenom” (Harper’s Bazaar).I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. But I don’t know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow. Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, Christine is seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers and friends.But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his cabin, deep in the woods of Maine, what she encounters threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it. A delicately explosive high-wire act about the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive, Discipline is a terse triumph about art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

From the Giller-shortlisted author of Glorious Frazzled Beings comes a beguiling debut novel humming with sensuality, intelligence, and a tinge of the absurd.After years of shouldering the childcare and housework, trying to keep her creative life and career alive, and managing her husband’s existential anxieties, the once whimsical Sarah is too burned out to dream. Most days, all she can muster is an imaginary version of her husband Trevor, one who actually listens to her, an almost-IRL replica of the husband in the picture-perfect image of their family she crafts online. Meanwhile, Trevor is caught in a downward spiral of his own. Strangled by his fear of artistic mediocrity and mounting sexual frustration, he fantasizes about the early college days when their romance was still athrill with seductive possibility.When both Sarah and Trevor secretly stumble on an auteur porn film based on the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne and Dionysus, they are immediately sucked into a dizzying maze of obsession, betrayal, and duplicate selves echoing backwards in time. With the arrival of a brilliant, alluring new student in Trevor’s university class, the line between fantasy and reality is increasingly blurred, threatening to collapse the walls of their mythology forever.With startling psychological insight, a sly sense of humour, and all the peculiar twists of a fairytale, Variations on a Dream is a fearless exploration of the lengths we will go to save what we believe to be a dream come true.

A taut, electrifying debut about a woman forced to confront unsettling truths about herself, her past, and the life she rebuilt following a ruinous affair with her former mentor, from a “lit world phenom” (Harper’s Bazaar).I have the sense that something is being drawn between us. Not drawn as in line but as in arrow pulled back. But I don’t know which of us holds the bow, and which of us faces the arrow. Christine is on tour for her novel, a revenge fantasy based on a real-life relationship gone bad with an older professor ten years prior. Now on the road, Christine is seeking answers—about how to live a good life and what it means to make art—through intimate conversations with strangers, past lovers and friends.But when the antagonist of her novel—her old painting professor—reaches out in a series of sly communiques after years of silence to tell her he's read her book, Christine must reckon with what it means to lose the reins of a narrative she wrote precisely to maintain control. When her professor invites her to join him at his cabin, deep in the woods of Maine, what she encounters threatens to change the very foundations of her life as she's imagined it. A delicately explosive high-wire act about the fictions we construct for ourselves just to survive, Discipline is a terse triumph about art-making and rigor, intimacy and attention, punishment and release.

The stories in this collection span characters, towns, decades, even centuries, but Florida—its landscape, climate, history, and state of mind—becomes its gravitational center: an energy, a mood, as much as a place of residence. Groff transports the reader, then jolts us alert with a crackle of wit, a wave of sadness, a flash of cruelty, as she writes about loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments and decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive.

The Plague is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947. It tells the story from the point of view of a narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. The narrator remains unknown until the start of the last chapter, chapter 5 of part 5. The novel presents a snapshot of life in Oran as seen through the author's distinctive absurdist point of view. The book tells a gripping tale of human unrelieved horror, of survival and resilience, and of the ways in which humankind confronts death, The Plague is at once a masterfully crafted novel, eloquently understated and epic in scope, and a parable of ageless moral resonance, profoundly relevant to our times. In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion. The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The novel stresses the powerlessness of the individual characters to affect their destinies. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial, whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings; the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.

A refreshing and unconventional take on the world of work.Perfect for fans of Brené Brown and Cal Newport, Today Was Fun challenges the notion that professionalism means being buttoned up and overworked and provides seven key rules for better days at work and in life.Bree Groff weaves together personal anecdotes, research, humor, and practical wisdom, outlining a compelling vision of modern workplaces that make people feel human and alive. Groff provides concrete strategies for implementation, from Do Nothing Days for inducing brilliant work to building a Portfolio Life that ensures work remains only one of many fulfilling things we do.An irreverent guide for a rising generation of leaders, Today Was Fun is poised to spark vital conversations about how we spend our days and to drive real change in organizations―promoting a fuller, more joyful life both in and out of the office.

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; the second expedition ended in mass suicide, the third in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another. The members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within weeks, all had died of cancer. In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the twelfth expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself. They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers—but it’s the surprises that came across the border with them and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another that change everything.

In this atmospheric Appalachian gothic, the Haddesley siblings of West Virginia must unearth long-buried secrets to carve out a future when the supernatural bargain entwining their fate with their ancestral land is suddenly ruptured Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a “bog-wife.” Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails—or refuses—to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future. Middle child Wenna, summoned back to the dilapidated family manor just as her marriage is collapsing, believes the Haddesleys must abandon their patrimony. Her siblings are not so easily persuaded. Eldest daughter Eda, de facto head of the household, seeks to salvage the compact by desecrating it. Younger son Percy retreats into the wilderness in a dangerous bid to summon his own bog-wife. And as youngest daughter Nora takes desperate measures to keep her warring siblings together, fledgling patriarch Charlie uncovers a disturbing secret that casts doubt over everything the family has ever believed about itself. Brimming with aching loss and the universal struggle between honoring family commitments and the drive to strike out on one’s own, The Bog Wife is a haunting invocation of the arcane power of the habits and habitats that bound us.