Built to Grow

Chapter 8Customer Strategy

‘Customers want memorable experiences and organizations must become stagers of great experiences.'

Are you and your business a stager of great customer experiences?

There is a massive philosophical shift happening in the way businesses around the world are having to think about how they acquire, maximize, and retain customers and it's affecting your business right now. Where you have previously been able to focus your energies on building great products and services as a competitive advantage, taking your business to its full potential is going to require something quite different in the future. The difference will be the experiences you can provide for your customers. (Note: to keep it simple I'll refer to the generic term customer throughout but the term client is implicit.)

How significant is this philosophical shift? According to Gartner, one of the leading research firms in the world, 95% of business leaders see customer experience as the key competitive battleground. Keep that number in mind because in this chapter we'll look at why the shift is happening and what you can do to find a leading position and points of differentiation in your business growth strategy.

The Big Idea

Let's start by putting customer experience in context so that we can agree it's not just a faddy idea, but a cast-iron common sense approach to growing your business. What if at the start of your new financial year I said you could employ another ten or a hundred or ...