Emerging Markets
In order to focus on the needs of our customers, we need to know more about who they are and how they interact with our products. One of the ways that we benefit from our unique mix of businesses is that we interact with our customers in their personal, academic, and professional lives. The introduction of better, cheaper smartphones, tablets, and other reading devices has blurred the lines of demarcation in the delivery of content for these different purposes. We are talking with our customers to learn more about their workflows and processes, which will enable us to provide solutions that help them achieve their goals.
Stephen M. Smith
Through the power of enabling technology, we are able to learn more than ever before about how our customers use, value, and interact with our products and services. Bringing that knowledge to bear on the way we acquire, develop, and market new products is a key to our future success.

Wiley Global Education conducted a major initiative to help us engage with our customers and offer them the best possible service within our chosen segments. We hired the Gallup organization to survey instructors on their needs and expectations, and then help us develop strategies and metrics that would guide us in meeting and exceeding those expectations. Our goal is to understand customer engagement with our brand so we can deliver fully on its promise in our products, technologies, and services.

We are also piloting a new customer relationship management system from Salesforce.com to provide us with a holistic view of customers that is enabling us to track all our interactions with them. In time, the extension of such a system across the Company will make visible for the first time the multiple relationships that customers have with Wiley — for example, the instructor who adopts our textbooks may also publish research in our journals and buy our travel guides or reference books. Informed with this level of knowledge, we will be able to serve customers more effectively than ever.

We drew on Extensive customer input to launch PfeifferCustom, an online service that allows leadership trainers to create custom workbooks containing the Wiley content they want with their own material added in. Under the Pfeiffer imprint, Wiley publishes market-leading leadership, management, and team-development materials, notably through The Leadership Challenge franchise and the works of Patrick Lencioni. In the course of an in-depth survey of professional trainers, we found that they regularly spend long hours photocopying portions of our books and mixing in their own material to create handouts targeting the particular groups they are working with. The online PfeifferCustom service, launched in April, allows them to build custom training materials in a fraction of the time, with the results delivered as attractive, four-color workbooks, branded with their logos. Beta testers were asking to place orders even before the service was available.

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Emerging Markets Products