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...