Managing Customer Experience and Relationships, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14 Organizing and Managing the Profitable Customer-Strategy Enterprise, Part 2: Transitioning from Traditional Business to Customer Centricity

The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.

—P. B. Medawar

More and more, companies have made big progress toward thinking about customer experiences, growing customer value deliberately, and managing for trusted customer relationships. Many new companies, such as Amazon.com, were born and raised this way. But thousands of companies that appeared way back in the twentieth century, or who have been managed by people who did, are still oriented around products, marketing campaigns, and sales regions, and are looking for the least disruptive way possible to deal with big customer databases, social media, and other new technologies.

It should go without saying that an existing enterprise based on traditional structures and management will not simply be able to paste a customer-management organizational structure atop its existing organization. Moreover, the change, in terms of success metrics, management roles and responsibilities, and the required capabilities of the enterprise, is profound. In truth, the transition never actually ends, because there will always be additional steps the enterprise can take to improve its relationships with its customers. So if a company is starting as a well-oiled product-marketing organization, taking the first tentative steps toward customer management ...