Customer's New Voice: Extreme Relevancy and Experience through Volunteered Customer Information

CHAPTER 5 Emerging Customer’s New Voice Business Information Model

The emerging customer’s new voice business model is fundamentally about the new flow of information. It is the first time in history that customers can communicate at scale to businesses directly. The key here is directly. Historically, businesses have “pushed” information to customers and consumers in an effort to sell the products and services based on their predictions or guesses as to what customers need or want. Now businesses are learning how to work the information flows first so that a direct stream of information can emanate from customers to radically enhance the information and ultimately the knowledge the businesses have about their current and potential customers.

Customer-Direct Information Model

The opportunity for businesses is to begin the journey to leverage individuals’ growing willingness, competency, and/or capability to directly share far more personal information than they have ever shared previously throughout the history of commerce. The vision of a 360-degree view of the customer or one version of the truth has proved to be only that: a lofty vision that has played out to be implausible without directly engaging the information source itself—the customer. Many businesses have come to the conclusion that the only 360-degree view or one version of the truth has and will always lie in only one place—inside the minds and hearts of the customer.

Many leading businesses have made positive ...