It's STILL All About the Customer

A Brief and Grossly-Incomplete History of Customer Focus

Jan Carlson published Moments of Truth in the late eighties. Shep Hyken coined the terms Moments of Magic and Moments of Misery. For years, Ron Zemke and Chip Bell encouraged us to knock customer's socks off. More recently, the CEB published a book about The Effortless Experience, where they say to build loyalty, companies need to stop thinking, "Exceed Expectations" and start thinking, "Make It Easy."

The Truth Is Out There, Mulder

Using Google as your search engine, a hunt for "customer service" returns about 1,230,000,000 results in 0.67 seconds. Try "customer experience" and you'll yield about 456,000,000 returns in 0.96 seconds. "Customer satisfaction" gets you 44,200,000 choices on Yahoo and "customer loyalty" gets you 17,900,000 hits on Bing.

We have Voice of the Customer, Customer Experience Management (with customer experience having its own kewl acronym of CX), Win/Loss Analysis and Net Promoter scores.

That's a lot of focus on the customer, isn't it? You'd think we'd have this whole thing nailed by now.

Your Baby Is Ugly, M'am (aka What Is This Elephant Doing Here?)

Yet, according to the Temking Group (nice infographic), "CX Excellence is rare, but the level is on the rise." According to my completely unscientific and biased personal experience as a buyer (both consumer and business), the state of customer service and experience is generally horrific with the occasional shining moment of glory.

After all these years, all these studies, all these efforts, it's still all about the customer, and we're still trying to get it right. Anyone else find this amazing?

The Path to Sales Growth through Customer Focus

I live in the world of sales training, sales enablement, sales effectiveness, sales operations, sales transformation, and all the latest labels we toss around to mean "get better sales results."

This growth journey starts, and ends, with the customer. So guess what? If we want sales growth in our companies, in our economy, in our marketplace, it's time to figure this out.

I'll be writing more about this topic here and at my blog, and I hope you'll follow the journey and weigh in with your perspective and experiences. I'm fond of saying that we need to elevate the sales profession, and to do that, we certainly need to elevate the focus on our customers. It's STILL all about them.

Over to you.