Success is only possible if your customers are satisfied. Successfully delivering an exceptional customer experience (CX) is an ongoing process of understanding, engaging, and delighting customers at every touchpoint. Whether you’re a seasoned CX professional or just starting out, staying ahead requires insights from the best in the business. So, what do you do to stay ahead of the game?
Fortunately, there are many books full of expert advice, proven strategies, and inspiring stories to help you. But with so many options available, finding the right resources can feel overwhelming.
Today, we want to recommend the best 10 customer experience books to read in 2025 so that you can apply this valuable knowledge to the growth of your business. In this blog, you will find some examples and expert advice that you can use to achieve this.
Why Read about Customer Experience?
Reading about customer experience and learning about other perspectives will help you improve the quality of customer interactions, reduce response time, avoid unnecessary paperwork, and identify areas of opportunity. But that’s not all; regular training and development are great tools for retaining employees.
Nowadays, if you have happy customers, they will feel like part of the organization and will even become brand ambassadors for your brand. They will surely recommend you to family and friends and even on their social networks. This is the best publicity your company can have, so you have to know how to take advantage of it.
Additionally, reading about CX helps you adapt to emerging trends and shifts in customer expectations. It gives you the ideas and strategies to evolve your approach and stay competitive in a customer-led market.
By learning about CX, you will improve your professional skills and lay the foundations for long-term business growth so your business will thrive in a world where customer satisfaction is everything.
10 Customer Experience Books That You Should Know
Want to boost your customer experience skills this year? It all starts with understanding the basics of CX. To help you get started, we’ve compiled a reading list highlighting the power of creating human-centered experiences.
Now, let’s start to find out which are some of the best books on customer experience and what they offer us:
1. Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service
Disney Institute and Theodore Kinni wrote this book and helps you plan a purpose based on the best customer service policies and quality standards. It also shows you how to guide your employees to be engaged and respect all customer service and care processes.
Disney is undoubtedly a benchmark for a brand that offers exceptional customer service, so there are countless good practices that we can imitate.
We recommend this book because Disney, being the happiest place on earth, has countless satisfied customers, and we want you to apply the same in your company so you can make customer service the basis of your business.
2. The Starbucks Experience
Joseph Michelli wrote this book and talks about the company’s success being driven by its employees and the unparalleled experience they create for each customer.
These principles can be applied in a variety of situations to enrich your business leadership skills, develop new challenges, improve the workplace and have attractive products, and pay attention to aspects of your business that can have immediate improvements and put them into practice.
If you work directly with clients, this is a book that will show you real stories, strategies, and anecdotes. This book can show you that a simple gesture that you make can benefit or harm you with your clients.
3. The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences
This book was written by Matt Watkinson and can help you resolve your doubts about customer experience, business principles, and their operational and practical application. The language is simple and clear, and you don’t need to have any previous knowledge.
It gives you a working model for implementing your own customer experience program. You’ll get the ten essential principles to build an amazing customer experience. It’s a must-read if you want to build lasting relationships with customers and a reputation for great service.
In this book, Matt Watkinson says:
“Businesses and governments are obsessed with setting metrics. First of all because such metrics can almost always be gamed. But also because they often translate badly into subjective experience.”
We recommend this book because the content is complete and precise, and, as an interesting fact, the author’s website contains worksheets and updates that add a lot of value to the content of the book.
4. What Customers Crave
What do customers really want? The key to any business is finding out what customers want. Today’s consumer expectations are changing radically, and this book shows you what businesses need to do to stay on top.
Solving it is based on two questions: What do your customers like? What do they hate? If you find the answers, you will find success for your company.
This book was written by Nicholas J. Webb and is a good recommendation because it will help you think about valuable information about your customers and what they care about.
5. The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact
This book is all about creating meaningful and memorable experiences for customers, employees, and even ourselves. The book is full of examples and practical strategies for designing moments that stick, whether in the workplace or beyond.
We recommend this book because it argues that great experiences happen by accident. Instead, it gives you the tools to design moments that stand out for customer experience, leadership, education, and personal interactions.
Dan and Chip Heath are well-known thought leaders and New York Times bestsellers. Their expertise shows in this book, so it’s a great resource if you want to create moments that stick. Here is a quote from this book:
“While human lives are endlessly variable, our most memorable positive moments are dominated by four elements: elevation, insight, pride, and connection.”
6. The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty
This book is written by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman, and Rick DeLisi. The authors present a data-driven approach to customer experience and focus on the concept of minimizing customer effort. The book is a roadmap to making your customer service efficient AND effortless – so you can retain customers and reduce waste and complexity in your operations.
If you’re in a leadership role or managing customer service, this book is a must-read. Here is a quote from the book:
“The role of customer service is to mitigate disloyalty by reducing customer effort.”
It reminds you that the most effective customer service doesn’t have to be flashy; it’s about fulfilling promises and solving day-to-day problems with ease.
By reading this book, you’ll learn how to make the customer experience simpler, more efficient, and less effortful for your customers.
7. The Cult of the Customer
Shep Hyken is a customer service and experience expert, keynote speaker, and New York Times best-selling author. With his many years of customer service experience, this book is a must-read for anyone looking to improve their customer interactions and create real loyalty.
In this book, Shep Hyken explores the idea of creating memorable customer experiences that go beyond satisfaction to create real loyalty. He says the most powerful experiences are those where the customer is at the center of every decision. Through a 5 step journey, he shows you how to turn customers into passionate brand advocates.
We recommend this book because it shows you how to go beyond just meeting expectations and creating experiences that customers will talk about. If you want to create loyal customers and word-of-mouth marketing, this is a great resource for learning how to level up your customer experience.
8. Winning at Social Customer Care
This book is by Dan Gingiss and is all about social media in customer service. It takes you through 8 steps to mastering customer care on digital platforms and choosing the right tools to talk to your customers in a world where new apps seem to pop up every day.
Gingiss shows you how to develop a social customer care philosophy, integrate social media into your existing customer service strategy, and handle feedback, both positive and negative. He also gives you real world examples of brands that get social customer care right and how you can copy their success.
We like this book because social media is a key customer service channel, and Gingiss gives you practical tips on how to deal with crisis management and customer loyalty. With tactics and examples, it’s a must-have for the digital age.
9. The Customer Experience Book” by Alan Pennington
In this book, Alan Pennington shows you how to create a customer experience strategy that beats customer expectations. It’s for people who want to implement a CX program that delivers real results. He explains the importance of a holistic approach to customer experience, from strategy to service design, so you can create exceptional customer experiences at every customer touchpoint.
A quote from the book is:
“Customer experience is not just about solving problems; it’s about creating moments that resonate with your customers, building trust and loyalty that lasts.”
This is the book for CX professionals, managers, and business owners who want to create an outstanding customer experience. It gives you the tools to create a strategy that works in the real world, so it’s perfect for anyone who wants to transform their business’s approach to customer satisfaction.
10. The Customer of the Future by Blake Morgan
In The Customer of the Future, Blake Morgan goes deep into the changing landscape of customer expectations and shows how to stay ahead of the curve. Morgan outlines ten key strategies businesses can adopt to anticipate and meet future customer demands.
The book shows how organizations must evolve to be relevant and deliver great experiences in a world of rapid technological change and shifting consumer behavior.
We recommend this book because it prepares you for the next wave of customer expectations. It’s all about adapting to future buyer mindsets and gives you practical strategies to not only survive but thrive in the ever-changing market.
For business owners, managers, and leaders, this is the must-have guide to being relevant in the future of customer service. It’s a future focussed approach to help you get ahead of customer needs before they happen, so you’re always one up on your competition.
Join the live discussion with our CX and EX experts as they explore how GenAI is shaping Customer Experience. Find out how companies’ DEI efforts are making a difference for both employees and customers, and take a closer look at what’s coming this year.
Conclusion
The economy, the generations, and the world are constantly changing, and when you think you know what kind of customer you have, you are really just beginning to know them.
These Customer Experience books help you understand what you haven’t yet managed to understand about your consumers. They give you tools for improvement, but most importantly, you will learn to see the purchase through the eyes of your customers.
Remember that at QuestionPro, we have the Customer Experience Ebook, where you will also find some of the best practices, recommendations, and tools to meet your customers’ needs, especially in the digital world in which we currently find ourselves.
