Book Summary Preview : The Customer Revolution

The Big Idea

BUSINESSES NEED TO BE MORE CUSTOMER-CENTRIC THAN PRODUCT-CENTRIC
IN ORDER TO THRIVE IN THE NEW ECONOMY.

1. Embrace the Customer Revolution and Thrive in the Customer Economy.

Unless you act now to focus on the quality and consistency of the customer experience you offer, your firm will be hopelessly lost in the turbulence. Customers have taken matters into their own hands, maximizing their power of choice. They prefer custom-designed experiences. They want good service, fair prices, and innovative offerings. If they don’t get it from your business, they will go elsewhere, and will tell the world too.

Sweet Surrender
Relinquish control of your company’s destiny. The Internet and mobile wireless devices arm the new customer with tools to access your business, as well as your competitors. Take a look at some of these examples:

• Peer-to-peer file sharing (Napster)
• Open-source design communities (Linux)
• Self-policing marketplaces (eBay)

Adapt to changing customer desires in real-time. A customer-focused culture attracts and retains employees because these companies are more fun to work in than those that are product-centric and bureaucratic.

How to Survive in this Profound Revolution:
• First, recognize every business is now an e-business.
• Second, realize there are no e-customers, only customers.
• Third, adopt new, dynamic partnering relationships as customers’ needs evolve.
• Fourth, be prepared to participate in customer-led, self-organizing communities and to respond flexibly as customer behavior reshapes your industry.

Focus on Customer Relationships
Investors want to know…
1. How many customers do you have?
2. How long have you been in an active relationship with each?
3. How are earnings per customer?
4. How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer?
5. How well are you able to retain your customers?

Monitor and Improve Customers’ Experiences (in Near Real-Time)
The companies that will thrive in the customer economy understand how to build and maintain customers’ trust by carefully managing customers’ experiences with their brands. . . . . . . . .

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