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

7. Risk: The Company Culture

From the onset, every customer-focused project is exposed to major differences in how the company sees things versus how the customer does, and those differences can completely destroy the potential benefit of the investment.

The ideal way to ensure a winning customer experience is to design the touchpoint experiences from the outside-in with the customers’ input. In Chapter 6, “Opportunity: The Customer View,” we discussed potential opportunities that can result from doing this and some of the risks of not doing it. However, even greater risks are associated from trying but doing it poorly—and those are the typical results of well-intentioned customer initiatives being unraveled by company culture.

What are a firm’s ...