The Customer Catalyst

CHAPTER 3EXPERIENCE

Customer Experience is the new brand

C-CHANGE GROWTH DRIVERS

• The most successful companies (in both B2B and B2C) relentlessly focus on delivering a great Customer Experience (CX). In such companies, the CEO, C-suite and other senior executives constantly lead, inspire and align employees across functions around an ‘outside-in’ customer view.
• Build an outside-in view of the customer by leveraging Voice of the Customer (VoC) insight, conducting journey mapping workshops with customers and employees, and then measuring and driving continuous improvement in CX.
• Do not let technology alone define CX. CX needs to be human-first with all employees aligning around the customers' wants and needs.

In 1999, Amazon achieved net sales of around US$1.6 billion. In 2017, net sales on amazon.com were US$177 billion. In 20 years, the company has grown 100×, and Amazon is now the largest retailer in the world. With its portfolio of other businesses, such as Amazon Web Services, this organisation is now truly disrupting many other industries such as financial services.

In a brilliant interview by CNBC in 1999, just before the dotcom crash of 2000, Jeff Bezos (see Figure 3.1) pointed out that Internet stocks were very volatile, and it was hard to predict the future successes of these businesses. Most critically, he suggested that getting the fundamentals right around CX was what Amazon truly stood for and would help it navigate the stormy seas to come:

FIGURE 3.1