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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Make customer-centricity tangible, sustainable, and real by implementing structural and systemic changes to the DNA of your company.
Businesses need to do more than sell to customers—they need to help them live their best lives. This superior experience is what customers expect and deserve from companies and it’s possible to deliver just that with the framework provided in The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life. An enlightening and pragmatic guide, The Customer Excellence Enterprise is for everyone who needs to elevate the customer experience to a fundamental revenue accelerator and value driver. With this fresh perspective on customer-centricity, companies can address the persistent disconnect between their customer-first claims and an often disappointing reality.
Wayne Simmons and Tom DeWitt are practitioners and professors of customer excellence. Wayne is a leader in customer excellence and customer experience management at Pfizer, the Fortune 50 global leader in health care and life sciences. Tom is the founder of CXM@MSU, an industry-facing entity designed to advance customer experience management thought and practice, and the founder and architect of North America’s first master’s degree in Customer Experience Management (CXM) at the Broad College of Business, Michigan State University.
Together, they expertly frame the complexities of consistently delivering a superior customer experience at enterprise and global scale and provide a compelling case for urgency for companies to take the journey to become a Customer Excellence Enterprise (CXE).
Outlining the leadership, organizational, operational, and commercial facets essential for sustained success, The Customer Excellence Enterprise is a comprehensive playbook for any company seeking to differentiate deeply from competitors and win preferred positions in the hearts and minds of today’s discerning customers.
With insights into how companies can become structurally and systemically predisposed to deliver exceptional experiences, the authors draw on real-world practice and examples from customer experience “outliers”―companies renowned for consistently improving their customers' lives. Readers will also find:
- Practical strategies for building a case for urgency and mobilizing all levels of the enterprise to deliver tangible results.
- Winning methods to build deep emotional connections that lead to lifelong customer relationships.
- Insights into the habits and ways of working from customer experience industry outliers.
The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life is a must-have for the boards of directors, C-Suite executives, line of business leaders and managers, marketers, sales teams, product leaders, human resources, customer experience, operations and other customer-facing professionals tasked with answering pressing questions like, Why are exceptional customer experiences still so rare? and If customers are truly the most valuable of corporate assets, why are they consistently being treated so poorly? This book serves as an invaluable tool and urgent call to action for anyone committed to elevating how customers are viewed, treated, and valued—the keys to creating customers for life.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
About the Authors
Introduction
A Renewed Sense of Corporate Purpose
The Growth Opportunity of Our Time
Solving the Paradox of Customer Centricity
Reigniting a Reverence for Customers
A Very Different Type of Company
Becoming Better Versions of Themselves
PART I: Helpfulness as an Organizing Principle
1 A Case for Urgency
The Logical Case: Meet Your Hyper-Empowered Customers
The Financial Case: The Leaky Bucket Syndrome
The Emotional Case: The End of Wow!
Chapter Takeaways: A Fork in the Road
Note
2 Missing the Mark with Customers
Customer Centricity to the Rescue?
Creating Illusions of Loyalty
Treating Customer Centricity as a Sideshow
The Persistent Prevalence of Customer Pain
Chapter Takeaways: Navigating Intricate Terrain
3 The Customers-for-Life Imperative
Highly Coveted and Extremely Valuable
The Incentive: The CX Value Premium
The Shift: Experiential Commerce
The Reminder: All Stakeholders Matter
The Obligation: The Customer’s Right to Reverence
The Invitation: Welcome to My Life
A Distinction That Is Earned, Never Given
Chapter Takeaways: Reconciling an Ideological Disconnect
4 Helpfulness as the Hero
Helpfulness: The New TQM
A New Primary Job to Be Done
The Psychology of Helpfulness
A Means to Overcome Positivity Bias
The First Factor Among Equals
Chapter Takeaways: Harness the Helpfulness Halo
5 The Preference Payoff
Becoming the Go-To Choice for Customers
Chapter Takeaways: Creating Positive Vibes
6 Introducing the Customer Excellence Enterprise
Introducing the Customer Excellence Enterprise (CXE)
Excellence in the Engine Room
The New Standard of Business
Core Attributes of the CXE
Chapter Takeaways: Value Creation for All
PART II: Helpfulness as an Operating System
7 Reprogramming Leadership DNA
Objective: Leaders Become the Principal Advocates for Customers
Chapter Takeaways: Setting the Tone at the Top
8 Resequencing Organizational DNA
Objective: Make Customer Outcomes a Shared Accountability
Chapter Takeaways: Make Customer Excellence an Organizational Habit
9 Rewiring Operational DNA
Objective: Modernize the Experience Delivery Factory
Chapter Takeaways: Intervene through Improvements and Innovations
10 Reimagining Commercial DNA
Objective: Deliver Excellence across the Customer Life Cycle
Chapter Takeaways: Establish a Win-Win Proposition with Customers
11 Meeting Customers Where They Are
Objective: Improve the Lives of as Many Humans as Possible
Bringing Customer Excellence to Citizen Experiences: Doing Better for Citizens
Making Health Care Experiences More Human: From Compliance to Empathy
Bringing Customer Excellence to the Fan Experience: Creating Memorable Moments
Contributing to the Collective Well-Being
Chapter Takeaways: There are No Free Passes
12 Getting Started: The Case for Urgency
Objective: Identify and Overcome Barriers to Change
Resistance to Change: A Cautionary Tale
Where to Start the Journey?
Crafting the Case for Urgency
Chapter Takeaways: A Journey Worth Taking
Epilogue
References
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 A new case for urgency has emerged for companies.
Figure 1.2 Decoding hyper-empowerment. With the dynamics of the new business...
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 The persistent disparity between customer expectations and their ...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Customers for life is an ideology that creates value for customer...
Figure 3.2 Anatomy of the customer experience value premium. Setting custome...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Customers are keeping score. In an ocean of choice, sameness, and...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Through seven key attributes, helpfulness can positively change t...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Customer excellence framework. An adaptable model and new standar...
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Within a CXE, empowerment comes into form through the THREE-Ps – ...
Figure 7.2 As a complement to the EGR metric, the risk-based CVaR metric can...
Figure 7.3 The Four-Rs provide an governance framework to make customer exce...
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 To achieve CXE scale and sustainability, knowledge must be diffus...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 The dynamic connection between the customer relationship portfoli...
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 In the commercial engine of the CXE, the evolution from the cust...
Figure 10.2 At every stage of the go-to-customer continuum in a CXE, emphasi...
Figure 10.3 Defining a brand identity optimized for experiential commerce re...
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 An example of a case for urgency for a global hotel brand, deliv...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
About the Authors
Begin Reading
Epilogue
References
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Index
End User License Agreement
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Wayne Simmons
Tom DeWitt, Ph.D.
THE Customer Excellence ENTERPRISE
A PLAYBOOK FOR Creating Customers for Life
Copyright © 2025 by Simmons & DeWitt. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permission.
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Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Simmons, Wayne (Customer experience expert), author. | DeWitt, Tom (Director), author.
Title: The customer excellence enterprise : a playbook for creating customers for life / Wayne Simmons and Tom DeWitt.
Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2024020710 | ISBN 9781394253685 (hardback) | ISBN 9781394253692 (ePub) | ISBN 9781394253708 (ePDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Customer relations. | Marketing.
Classification: LCC HF5415.5 .S559 2024 | DDC 658.8/12—dc23/eng/20240601
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024020710
Cover Design: Wiley
Cover Image: © Alan Dino Hebel and Ian Koviak
Author Photo: Courtesy of Brian Morrison
This book is dedicated to my wife, Keary, for her patience as I ruined many weekends and several vacations writing this book and for her daily prayers motivating me to press on. To my family and friends, I extend apologies for my absence and gratitude for your inspiration, love, and understanding. Finally, as with everything I do, I dedicate this work to my forebears, who made one of the wonders of the world possible by digging the Panama Canal with picks, shovels, and bare hands so that I could write a book one day.
—Wayne
This book is dedicated to my wife, Jackie, and daughters, Cher-Wen and Su-Hwei, for their enduring patience and support throughout my professional career. I also wish to thank my students, who inspire me every day.
—Tom
Prologue
Give us your hard-earned money, and shut the h*ll up!
ON JANUARY 2, 1999, the covenant between customers and companies finally broke. On that infamous day, passengers on Northwest Airlines flight 1829 were “held hostage” (their choice of words) for over eight hours on the snow-packed tarmac of Detroit’s Metro Airport. They were left without food, water, or functioning toilets, and the conditions on the plane devolved into a nightmare for passengers just returning from the joy of the holidays. While there have been similar incidents before and since, this particular situation is noteworthy for several reasons. First, Northwest Airlines, which had earned the unenviable nickname “Northworst,” suffered a systemic failure of customer care, exposing structural flaws and disconnects between frontline, customer-facing employees and its operational decisions and priorities. Next, the now-defunct airline failed to take accountability for its actions (or inactions), putting itself in conflict and legal jeopardy with its customers and employees, who suffered equally on that tarmac. Choosing to deny and deflect any obligation to customers beyond getting them to their destination safely, Northwest also signaled to the broader traveling public the adversarial manner in which paying customers were to be viewed, treated, and valued – effectively telling customers to give us your hard-earned money and shut the h*ll up!
Symbolized by the incident itself, and the inevitable media maelstrom, regulatory action, and litigation that followed, the company showed that the expectations and standards set by paying customers might have evolved to be fundamentally misaligned with the company’s capacity and willingness to meet those expectations. While a blizzard was the root cause of the plight of flight 1829 and others, Northwest did not have the systems and structures to anticipate and deal with the situation, nor did it empower the frontline employees closest to the customer. Moreover, the company lacked the institutional mindset and empathetic instincts that would have allowed them to “sit in their customers’ seats” to fully appreciate the intensity of their predicament or prioritize their well-being at a basic human level. This reality was framed by the company’s prior “Northworst” reputation for poor customer care and operations, where the absence of positive goodwill in the customer–company relationship likely amplified an incident of inconvenience into a crisis of corporate character.
Beyond giving customers the basics of what they paid for, are companies under any additional obligation to consider how those customers are to be treated?
About the Authors
SPARTANS WILL.
WAYNE SIMMONS is a commercial customer excellence and customer experience leader within the Chief Marketing Office (CMO) of Pfizer, where he is responsible for crafting and executing the company’s global customer experience management strategy, leading the adoption of customer-centric ways of working, and serving as the company’s principal technical advisor on customer experience. He has prior marketing, commercial, and customer experience leadership roles with Bayer Pharmaceuticals, The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center, and Mercer and has provided CXM transformation and turnaround consulting to leading global brands in the financial services, consumer goods, hospitality, and retail sectors. Wayne is also a professor of practice on the faculty of the Master of Science in Customer Experience Management (MS-CXM) degree program within the Department of Marketing, Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. Wayne is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), a prior board member of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), and a US Army Intelligence veteran. He resides in the New York City metropolitan area.
Tom Dewitt, PhD, is the founder and director of CXM@MSU, an entity housed within the Broad College of Business at Michigan State University that is dedicated to the advancement of customer experience management thought and practice through a variety of initiatives designed to showcase industry best practices. He is also the founder and academic director of the Master of Science in Customer Experience Management (MS-CXM) degree program, North America’s first academic degree program at an accredited university. Dr. DeWitt has shared his expertise globally through consulting, presentations, and interactive workshops. Before joining academia, Tom held leadership positions in the hospitality industry in the USA and Asia. He resides in East Lansing, Michigan.
Introduction
THE WORLD CAN be a very unpleasant place for customers. They no longer feel heard. They no longer feel valued. And they definitely no longer feel special. Throughout their daily lives, with emotions ranging from disappointment and disbelief to exasperation and rage, customers today are increasingly being forced to endure unprecedented levels of friction, effort, and pain in far too many of their interactions with companies. Whether it is being bombarded with intrusive digital marketing emails, enduring the emotional trauma of holiday-destroying flight delays, or suffering through the indignities of inhospitable hospitality in hotel, restaurant, and health care interactions, customers are right to feel that many companies are taking them for granted, treating them with indifference or hostility, and in some cases, outright contempt.
A Renewed Sense of Corporate Purpose
Curiously, at the same time, many companies today consider themselves more attuned to the human condition, publicly espousing the virtues of customer centricity and employee engagement in search of a more relevant and authentic sense of purpose in society. Through dalliances with a veritable alphabet soup of idealism, such as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), environmental, social, and governance (ESG) initiatives, socially responsible investing (SRI), focusing capital on the long-term (FCLT), companies are consciously seeking ways to reconcile the demand for results at all costs with the desire for greater equity for all, the profit motive with social consciousness. At the center of these noble aspirations is the urgent need for companies to better align their purpose to the shifting values and elevated expectations of an entirely new type of “hyper-empowered” customer.
While finding and anchoring in a renewed sense of purpose can be a real challenge for even the most introspective of companies, it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Captured by the Orwellian maxim “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle,” The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life was written with the underlying belief that the authentic purpose that companies are searching for is actually right in front of them: the obligation to help the customers they serve live their best lives.
This simple edict sets an exceedingly high bar that, sadly, far too many companies simply cannot or willfully choose not to meet. On the positive side, this societal compact creates rarefied air that a select few companies have sought to understand and strived to reach. These “customer experience outliers” differentiate deeply from their competitors, consistently earn a place in the hearts, minds, and lives of their customers, and capture outsized financial rewards along the way.
The Growth Opportunity of Our Time
Reconciling the conflicts between how companies speak about customers and how they actually treat them becomes the untapped win-win growth opportunity of our time and the central value proposition offered in The Customer Excellence Enterprise. Rather than simply transacting with customers in a purely functional exchange of value, companies are uniquely positioned (and paid!) to engage at a more emotional and experiential level to help customers realize their dreams, aspirations, and the myriad other desired outcomes that they are pursuing in the daily flow of their lives. Whether it’s helping travelers live like locals, empowering families to eat healthier, providing the assurance of on-demand ride sharing options, promoting financial peace of mind, or facilitating the many mundane routines of daily life, customers are searching for and seeking to invite a select few companies to become integrated into their lives as trusted partners. For the companies that can reach that bar, the payoff is clear: earning customer love – preferential positions in the hearts and minds of customers, unlocking powerful experience economics, a self-perpetuating engine room of growth and value creation.
Solving the Paradox of Customer Centricity
The obligation to help customers live their best lives presents companies with an authentic purpose and the seeds of a big audacious goal. By exercising the societal agency inherent in meeting that obligation, individual companies can contribute to a compounding effect, collectively helping, even in the smallest or most mundane of ways, to improve the daily life of millions and billions of humans…one need fulfilled, one empathetic interaction, one moment of delight, one promise kept at a time. This is not to be confused with corporate altruism; rather, it is fundamentally aligned to the principles of stakeholder capitalism. Specifically, striving to meet this obligation is about earning the right to turn ordinary transactional customers into customers for life, an outcome that is rooted in a clear economic thesis that places a value premium on long-term customer relationships.
Therein lies the paradox. Despite the lip service and self-evident benefits of customer centricity, the devaluing and mistreatment of customers has become far too widespread, if not normalized, in society. The exceptions have now overwhelmed the rules. Popularized by dramatic news reports set in overcrowded airports during the holiday travel crunch, social media clickbait showing customers freaking out in confrontations with frazzled, underpaid, and underappreciated frontline employees, or the business channel interview with the overly clever CEO proclaiming the wisdom of fully automating or simply eliminating customer support roles altogether, the current state of customer interactions is taking a real toll on real people…one need unfulfilled, one abrasive interaction, one moment of frustration, one promise broken at a time.
This presents critical questions for companies:
If customers are so important, why do they believe that they are consistently being treated so poorly?
Why have excessive effort and friction become the expectation rather than the exception in the many journeys of daily life?
Twenty-five years after the “Welcome to the Experience Economy” article was written in
HBR
, why are exceptional experiences still so rare?
Why is it acceptable for newly acquired customers to walk through the front door, while existing customers are compelled to walk out the back door?
Why are the frontline functions and employees that are closest to customers so devalued and perpetually targeted for reorganizations and budget cuts?
Why do marketing and sales get a free pass when it comes to delivering exceptional, value-added interactions and experiences to customers?
Are poor experiences a temporary blip on the radar or a permanent phenomenon that society must simply learn to live with?
Is the current state of play the inevitable fallout from leaders treating customer centricity as a disposable buzzword, rather than a strategic must-have?
Why are so many companies failing to appreciate how poor experiences are actually degrading the well-being and quality of life of their customers?
In pursuit of answers to these types of questions, this book attempts to separate the mythology of customer centricity within companies from the lived reality of their customers.
Reigniting a Reverence for Customers
If you are reading this, you are likely a business leader working to make the promise of customer centricity in your company a reality. You might be a chief executive officer (CEO), P&L owner, or chief marketing officer (CMO) accountable for growth, value creation, and value protection. Or you might be a brand manager or market strategist accountable for driving customer engagement and conversions, or a corporate strategist or product leader focused on maximizing enterprise value or revenue performance. Perhaps you are a mythical chief customer officer (CCO) or chief experience officer (CXO), or working in another commercial or customer-focused role in marketing, sales, customer engagement, customer success, customer experience management, or customer care.
Regardless of your specific role, you are continuously searching for an angle or an edge to bring your innate reverence for customers to life. You imagine compelling ways to capture the attention of those discerning and often beleaguered customers, deliver truly differentiated value and exceptional experiences to them, and establish the customer love that keeps them coming back for more. You are probably passionate about finding ways to attract new customers in ways that are less intrusive, driven to retain them by winning their hearts and minds, and expanding your relationships with them by offering them unique value and occasional moments of “wow” in their lives. Your specific role or circumstance notwithstanding, your instincts tell you that there must be a better way.
A Very Different Type of Company
The Customer Excellence Enterprise humbly endeavors to present such a better way – a more human and holistic way to think about customer centricity, a more assertive, value-driven flex of the fields of customer engagement, customer experience management, customer success, and customer care and a more structural and systemic way to bring those ideas into practical form. This book approaches these topics as an urgent (existential for some) priority for companies and leaders, based on another fundamental truth: customers are now “keeping score” – the act of continuously evaluating their relationships with companies, subconsciously rank-ordering them against each other on the basis of value and the totality of their experiences, and using those virtual scores to inform their decisions about which companies to invite into their lives as trusted partners and which ones not to.
Becoming Better Versions of Themselves
At the core, The Customer Excellence Enterprise argues that companies must demand more of themselves on behalf of their customers and their stakeholders. The basic thesis being advanced here is that superficial or functional attempts at customer centricity are completely insufficient to make this urgent imperative a reality. What’s offered here instead is a playbook to resolve the missing links – the structural and systemic changes to leadership, organizational, operational, and commercial DNA needed to make customer centricity tangible, durable, and real. With an emphasis on “soft factors,” the mindsets, beliefs, and deeply held assumptions that manifest as organizational norms, behaviors, and ways of working, this book addresses these often inconvenient, but ultimately decisive, factors that many companies are simply unaware of, or choose not to confront. For those intrepid few who have the will and wherewithal to take this more holistic and human approach to customer centricity, they are rewarded by earning the distinction of becoming a customer excellence enterprise (CXE), a very different type of company purpose built to win in the era of experiential commerce.
Crucially, this means that resetting the standard of business to create customers for life should become the grand aspiration for companies and the shared mission connecting leaders and employees internally with brand promises and customer expectations externally. Brought to life through the notion of helpfulness as both an organizing principle in Part 1 and an operating system in Part 2, many of these ideas and implementation-ready “bold moves” reflect the unique strategies, tactics, and success formulas used by customer experience outliers – those select few, universally admired, and perennially successful enterprises, such as USAA, Amazon, The Ritz Carlton, Volvo, Chewy.com, T-Mobile, Singapore Airlines, IKEA, Toyota, and Disney, that have mastered the craft of creating a better existence for their customers.
play·book /ˈplāˌboŏk/. Designed as an actionable playbook, we’ve included over thirty-five “plays” called “bold moves,” which are collections of guidance, principles, frameworks, and examples that organizations can tailor to their specific context. With the goal of infusing the spirit of helpfulness into the business world and catalyzing new cohorts of customer experience outliers, we hope this is not only a book to read but also one to apply.
While The Customer Excellence Enterprise enters an active discourse surrounding “all things customer,” rather than approaching it as a dogmatic or theoretical prescription, it does so as an intentional provocateur and challenger of the status quo, coming from both the pragmatism of real-world practice and the curiosity of academic endeavor. Instead of revisiting well-traveled functional terrain about how to build better conversion funnels or journey maps, debating personal points of view or ideological stances, or simply reacting to the shifting sands of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, or whatever comes next in the broader customer and business landscape, The Customer Excellence Enterprise leans on the timelessness and elegant simplicity of helpfulness, a quality inherent to the human condition, alive in every one of us, and by extension present in the potential of every company and how they interact with, treat, and value their customers. In this context, The Customer Excellence Enterprise seeks to provide companies with a purposeful foundation and building blocks to elevate the standard of business, inspiring customer love, integrating into their lives as trusted partners, and earning the right to consider them customers for life.
We hope that you find it helpful.
PART IHelpfulness as an Organizing Principle
“Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
– Vince Lombardi
WINNERS, LOSERS, LEADERS, and laggards. The business arena includes a diverse spectrum of players, from confident winners and unfortunate losers to assertive leaders and hesitant laggards, as well as a multitude of characterizations occupying the space in between. Leaders constantly set the bar for performance, while laggards struggle just to keep up. The contrast between these two extremes is a story of the choices that companies make, the paths they choose to take or not, and the stuff they are made of.
As we explore in Part 1 a new company archetype has emerged: the customer excellence enterprise (CXE). The envy of their competitors, CXEs are customer experience outliers that forge distinctive identities for themselves. These unique entities elevate the standard of business and redefine the formula of corporate success in ways that defy the differentiation, growth, and value creation boundaries that constrain ordinary companies.
The journey to becoming a CXE starts when companies embrace an organizing principle that serves as a connective fabric and catalyst at all levels and corners of the organization. Such a principle acts as the throughline that binds all facets of the company together, providing leaders and employees alike with a shared understanding of the organization’s core purpose and guiding their collective efforts toward reaching a common destination. Rather than being theoretical constructs, within a CXE, organizing principles are pragmatic reflections of the aspirations of the organization, showing up in ways that are organic to the basic theory of the firm, its propositions to customers, and its promises to all of its stakeholders.
Enter helpfulness as an organizing principle, a game changer for any company and a key to becoming a customer experience outlier. Adopting helpfulness as a guiding ethos has the universal familiarity and appeal to unite entire organizations around an eminently relatable human attribute. It also provides a focal point for how the functional aspects of customer centricity, customer engagement, customer experience management, customer success, and customer care can be repositioned as core value drivers within corporate success formulas. Through the unambiguous declaration that every action, interaction, and decision revolves not just around customers in an abstract sense but explicitly around helping customers achieve their desired outcomes and live their best lives, companies can set themselves apart as CXEs. Becoming such a perennial exemplar of performance means entering the rarefied air of customer love – earning preferential positions in the hearts and minds of discerning customers in crowded and noisy markets.
The time is now for a new generation of customer experience outliers to emerge – customers are hungry for it. Beaten down by the weight of far too many poor experiences, many customers are now in a perpetual state of frustration and disappointment. Simply put, customers expect, need, and deserve better. When customers are valued as more than transactions, they invite a select few companies into coveted long-term relationships, making them the go-to option in an ocean of choice. Beyond mere buzzwords or marketing slogans, with intention and design, becoming a customer excellence enterprise means embedding helpfulness as an organizing principle deep into leadership, organizational, operational, and commercial DNA, codifying the societal obligation to help the customers they serve live their best lives, earning not just their gratitude, loyalty, and advocacy but the right to consider them customers for life.
1A Case for Urgency
“Change before you have to.”
– Jack Welch
NAME A COMPANY that doesn’t covet satisfied and loyal customers. The advantages of respecting customers, being empathetic to their needs, and delivering exceptional experiences to them are seemingly self-evident. However, as compelling as they may be, those advantages by themselves often lack the power to elevate the way companies view, value, and treat customers. What’s often missing is a compelling case for urgency, a clear strategic rationale for why companies must depart from the current state of their relationships with customers, and why they must do so at pace (Figure 1.1).
With structural and systemic implications for companies of all shapes and sizes, a new case for urgency has taken shape across the business and customer landscape. This essential change is rooted in the simple truth that customers expect, need, and deserve better from companies, and companies must demand more of themselves on behalf of their customers. This customer-inspired case for urgency is multifaceted, impacting “where to play” and “how to win” decisions and the very nature of the value exchange and the relationship that companies have with customers. With logical, financial, and emotional dimensions, this case for urgency helps companies answer the critical questions of “Why they must move off their status quo?” and “Why must it be done now?” The result is a call to action for companies to understand, acknowledge, and make bold moves.
Figure 1.1 A new case for urgency has emerged for companies.
The Logical Case: Meet Your Hyper-Empowered Customers
Customers now have the power. If navigating the complex business environment alone were not enough, companies must grapple with yet another powerful emerging force: the hyper-empowered customer. This new customer archetype possesses an unprecedented level of influence and control in their relationships with companies. Signaling a decisive shift in the power dynamics of the company-customer value exchange, hyper-empowered customers are borne from the collective realization that customers today have more choices than ever when searching for, selecting, or deciding whether to stay loyal to one company over a multitude of others.
Equipped with smartphones, apps, and other easily accessible tech, customers are now more vocal – they can instantly share or livestream their positive or negative interactions and experiences with companies through social media and online rating platforms. With the click of a button, frustrating or unsatisfactory experiences that were previously endured privately and without recourse by customers can now quickly be shared into the public discourse. This virtual airing of dirty laundry can become embarrassing clickbait, or in some cases, brand-eroding viral sensations (Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2 Decoding hyper-empowerment. With the dynamics of the new business landscape, the center of gravity has shifted to customers.
The emergence of the hyper-empowered customer has caused a significant disruption in the conventional understanding and power dynamics of the customer life cycle. Hyper-empowered customers no longer settle for being passive participants or anonymous targets in arbitrary demographic segments as they interact with a company. As they engage through multiple touchpoints, these increasingly discerning customers wield tremendous influence that shows up most acutely as hurdles to consider and overcome at key customer decision points and moments of truth, fundamentally reshaping every stage of the customer life cycle: awareness, selection, purchase, usage, retention, and advocacy.
Awareness Stage: Hyper-Empowered Customers Are Harder to Reach
The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), China’s Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), and a plethora of other state and national regulatory regimes are further reinforcing customer hyper-empowerment. Particularly noted in the letter and spirit of the Right to Be Forgotten element of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), these new regulations reinforce the shift in the power dynamics between customers and companies. Under this particular regulation, customers decide what information about them is accessible online, forcing companies to seek explicit consent for how data is collected and used, inhibiting their ability to reach and target specific audiences or provide personalized experiences. Further, personally identifiable information (PII), the prized currency of omnichannel customer engagement, digital marketing, online advertising, and e-commerce, is now far less accessible for targeting, soliciting customer feedback, and measuring sentiment. The implications of these new customer-centric rules, combined with the elimination of third-party cookies, device-specific privacy safeguards, and the emergence of consent models with explicit opt-in requirements, are making customers much less accessible. This dynamic makes them much less susceptible to the influence of advertising, brand messaging, promotions, and marketing campaigns and much more reliant on their own research, social media recommendations, and online reviews when making life cycle decisions.
Selection Stage: Hyper-Empowered Customers Expect More
Launching the next great product or novel feature may no longer be enough to earn the patronage of hyper-empowered customers. While geopolitical uncertainty, economic volatility, and societal tensions dominate the headlines, with very little fanfare, a seismic structural shift in the business landscape has taken place – experiential commerce, where the basic way in which value is exchanged between customers and companies has shifted from tangible goods and products to intangible services and experiences. In the hearts and minds of hyper-empowered customers, the experiential attributes can now hold equal or greater significance than the functional utility of the core product or service itself. Delivered through complex ecosystems of in-person and digital interactions across apps, retail and digital storefronts, social media, web platforms, and smartphones, new experience-led propositions have become essential actors in the daily lives of customers and new high-value engagement channels and revenue streams for companies. With the continued proliferation of disruptive new technologies and business models, the impact of experiential commerce will only accelerate and deepen.
With implications for what customers expect, how companies deliver value to them, and how they face off against competitors, this shift reflects a redefinition of value in the eyes of the customers. Emphasis is now placed on the cumulative experience that customers have with companies, underscoring the primacy of the underlying factors (e.g. helpfulness, consistency, personalization, simplicity) that drive experiential commerce, shape customer expectations, and influence their decisions. Experiential factors include intangible, emotionally focused aspects of a company’s proposition, such as the responsiveness of post-purchase customer care and the levels of effort and friction that customers encounter when making e-commerce returns. Particularly relevant in digital offerings, experiential factors such as ease of use on a mobile banking app can greatly enhance a customer’s experience and their decisions to choose one financial institution among many options. These types of intangible aspects and experiential factors are under significantly more scrutiny and will continue to command greater consideration in company offerings and value propositions, fundamentally resetting the company-customer value exchange.
Purchase Stage: Hyper-Empowered Customers Are Harder to Convert
Experience is everything and everywhere. The global pandemic and deep changes in customer preferences have greatly expanded demand for digital interactions, omnichannel engagement, and direct-to-consumer models. Against this backdrop, hyper-empowered customers now demand high-quality interactions across the customer life cycle, featuring frictionless transitions between online and offline channels and reliable, transparent end-to-end fulfillment. With very little room for error, barriers to their success or excess effort faced by customers might result in their abandoning the purchase (i.e. cart abandonment) or initiating expensive reverse logistics processes that often involve coordination with third-party service providers. Behind the scenes, this requires companies to master the art and science of orchestrating everything from personalized promotions at the point of sale to ensuring reliable and cost-effective last-mile delivery and pickups. Achieving this must be done not only to satisfy customer expectations but also to seamlessly integrate these front-of-house (i.e. customer-facing) interactions into back-of-house operations in ways that capture the attention of empowered customers but also in economically viable ways.
Beyond the functional factors of purchasing, this most pivotal moment of truth, customers are increasingly choosing to spend their time and money with companies based on experiential factors – the underlying elements that make up the end-to-end experience. With every interaction factoring into purchase moments of truth and life cycle decisions, it is no longer sufficient for companies to simply deliver better experiences than their traditional industry competitors because customer expectations and definitions of value are now being set outside of industry boundaries by a select few customer experience outliers. Often referred to as the “Amazon effect,” customer expectations for convenient, effortless, transparent, and frictionless purchasing experiences are systematically being elevated, continuously resetting the standards of business, regardless of industry.
Usage Stage: Hyper-Empowered Customers Are Harder to Please
Through word of mouth, online ratings, media, brand communications, and, most significantly, actual interactions with companies, customers are in a continuous state of evaluating companies against each other. As hyper-empowered customers accumulate experiences with a company over time, they subconsciously note and assign values to each positive or negative interaction. These consumers are challenging to please because of their subconscious habit of keeping a mental scorecard of their interactions with companies. This scorecard is not just a passive record; it’s an active tool they use to subconsciously ascribe a score for each company, resulting in a relative ranking or “running tally” that customers then use to make calculated trade-offs as they contemplate which companies to consider, select, purchase from, stay loyal to, or defect from. For companies, the interplay between customer scorekeeping and the pivotal decisions that they make across their life cycle determines whether the company-customer value exchange will simply be short-term and transactional or the basis for an enduring or lifetime customer relationship.
Questions to Consider
With virtually unlimited choices, what will compel hyper-empowered customers to consistently choose, stay loyal to, and advocate for your business or brand over others?
Retention Stage: Hyper-Empowered Customers Are Harder to Keep
Markets are saturated with a vast array of competitive offerings, giving customers numerous options at their disposal. With access to product reviews, price comparisons, and social media platforms, they are well-equipped to make informed decisions across the customer life cycle. Despite the desire for hyper-empowered customers to integrate a select few trusted partners into their lives, the abundance of choices makes switching to a competitor an accessible option. Whether the root cause is dissatisfaction with an interaction, expectations going unfulfilled, or a competitor’s enticing promotions, the ability of the hyper-empowered to quickly research, compare offerings, and make trade-offs equips them to switch to a competitor that better meets their needs or preferences. As a result, companies face the challenge and expense of not only acquiring these discerning customers initially but also continuously delivering differentiated value and experiences at a level that compels them to stay for the long haul.
But the retention of hyper-empowered customers has a twist. Driven by human nature, a fascinating conflict exists within customers themselves. On one hand, customers have a strong desire to establish enduring relationships with a select few companies. These relationships provide a sense of comfort and familiarity, where customers know what to expect and can rely on their chosen providers as trusted partners in their lives. On the other hand, thanks to the abundance of choices in hypercompetitive markets, customers also possess enormous power to switch between companies. However, the act of switching can be daunting and complicated, often involving significant effort to research, make decisions, and adapt to new offerings. This creates a paradox: customers have the power to explore or switch to other options, but owing to their desire for the assurance and comfort of long-term relationships, they don’t necessarily want to use that power. Many companies have grown to understand this dynamic and leverage it nefariously to take customers for granted or keep them locked in captive relationships. This puts customers in a constant tug-of-war between the comfort of continuity and the potential of change, making contemporary customer retention strategies a delicate dance.
Advocacy Stage: Hyper-Empowered Customers Are Less Likely to Become Champions
The adage “revenge is a dish best served cold” aptly characterizes some of the behaviors that really set the hyper-empowered customer apart and demonstrates the weight of their influence in the advocacy stage of the customer life cycle. In the language of NPS®,1 the opposite of a customer advocate or promoter is a customer detractor. While much attention is paid to understanding and attempting to convert detractors into promoters, not a lot of attention is placed on the value destruction that they can cause if they devolve into negative activists. In their constant state of assessing and scoring how a company treats them and whether their expectations are consistently being met, customers can and do file complaints privately. Or, using their newfound power, they may be provoked to go to the other end of the spectrum, publicly blasting offending companies, exacting small measures of revenge and gaining a bit of redemption for themselves.
Questions to Consider
Where do your customers go to read and write reviews about your company? How do you measure sentiment across those reviews? Can you quantify the impact of customer reviews?
When hyper-empowered detractors get an offending company in their sights, the capacity for value destruction can expand exponentially. As they metamorphose into activists, these detractors have the ability to weaponize online reviews to publicly berate and mobilize the silent masses to expose companies that have disappointed them. Whether responding to grievances that are real or perceived, when activist detractors take the time to write detailed, compelling, and well-articulated negative reviews, they can negate marketing and advertising efforts by swaying potential customers who are often influenced more by authentic experiences and genuine feedback than by commercial messaging.
These reviews may highlight issues related to a company’s offerings but can also reveal, often in intimate detail, how companies treat their customers through various interactions. Resonating at a more human and emotional level, getting a window into the experience that they may potentially have, can influence the purchasing choices of audiences far beyond the personal networks of the reviewer, prompting discerning customers to reconsider their purchasing decisions and steering them toward alternatives. To navigate the new dynamics of advocacy, companies must understand the long game of accumulated interactions, the subconscious evaluations that customers make, and the potential value destruction that can occur when hyper-empowered customers not only fail to become enthusiastic champions but become activist detractors.
The shift in power dynamics to favor the hyper-empowered customer is evident in their ability to shape brand perceptions and influence the life cycle decisions of others. With the role of online reviews and customer testimonials, their collective voice can make or break a company’s reputation. In the end, winning the hyper-empowered customer is not optional; companies need to understand and align with their preferences, needs, and values throughout the entire customer relationship to foster loyalty, advocacy, and sustainable value creation.
The Financial Case: The Leaky Bucket Syndrome
Although this is unquestionably a business book that starts with the hyper-empowered customer, this story continues with a financial case for urgency drawn from a leaky bucket on a mythical street that many of us know and love. No, we aren’t talking about Wall Street in Lower Manhattan or Lombard Street in the City of London; we are talking about Sesame Street. Yes, Sesame Street! For the uninitiated, as a groundbreaking Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television program and home of Jim Hansen’s iconic Muppets, Sesame Street has captured the hearts and minds of legions of young viewers with its innovative blend of educational content and endearing characters for decades. Serving as both a nurturing home for those lovable puppets and an engaging learning environment for children, Sesame Street became an unparalleled safe space where kids could grow, learn, and embark on a journey of lifelong discovery.
