To be truly customer-centric, you may need to change your conversations

7 Jul 2011

How do you obsess over what's best for the end user if you lack not just the mechanisms to observe and understand what "what's best" looks like, but also the will to start observing? Too many companies have deluded themselves into thinking they were smart enough to guess what customers wanted, and that delusion permitted them to move other business concerns to the front burner.

A business that's succeeding at CRM (and that means the discipline of CRM, not the technology) will have come to some realizations. First off, even though the business no longer controls the conversation with the customer, that conversation has never been more important to pay attention to and to respond to in a coherent and, when possible, personalized way.

Second, it's critical to realize that these relationships are a key part of the customer experience, especially in the era of the social customer. And customer experience, ultimately, is everything. Third, when you try to de-emphasize the customer relationship in favor of the things you're comfortable focusing on as a business, everything in the business is likely to suffer.

Read the full article on E-CommerceTimes.com.