Who Stole My Customer??: Winning Strategies for Creating and Sustaining Customer Loyalty

Chapter 8. What They Want: Ten Myths About Your Customers

To become customer centered and customer preferred, a firm must change its orientation and design its business capabilities, infrastructure, and measures of success from the outside-in by using the customers’ perspective. There are several real issues to overcome to do that. The first is that a firm’s current beliefs about its customers tend to drive its policies, decision making, and not only what its employees do with customers, but also what they don’t do. This becomes so embedded that firms practice this without realizing it, and it results in great resistance to new ideas about customers when the old ideas are so heavily ingrained.

The automobile company, for example, did not want to ...