Illustration via chuc coker on flickr.com

I get it: business is much simpler without customers

At no time in recent history has it been more important to be really good at our customers. But is the opposite happening? Are companies turning away from their customers and back towards their products and internal operations?

As I learn about the emerging customer-trends within business I keep getting reminded of this quote by Shoshana Zuboff and the comic I used to illustrate it 10+ years ago:

“..the old model was created to keep consumers out. Those are extrinsic factors that we keep on the outside so they don’t mess up our ability to be efficient and standardized and so on so forth.” — Shoshana Zuboff

And I get it. Focusing on the customer didn’t really work out as we were promised:

1. It’s way to hard .. the customer methods don’t match the rest of the organizations operating mindset.
2. We are not measuring or incentivizing the customer focus (most incentives are on channel optimization or sales, we are not measuring the line-of-sight from customer to business value).
3. We didn’t bring the messy fussy and warm customer into the cold hard world of the business, but insisted the business come to the customer
4. We kept doing these creative workshops, thinking that there is an outsized link between creativity and the customer (not more than anything else). Branding the customer as something confusing and ‘magic’ instead of measurable, strategizable and impactful
5. And eventually people kept calling out anything as ‘customer focused’, especially in digital. while the customer was nowhere to be found amongst the jungle of channels and sentiment-scores.

But that doesn’t make forgetting the customer better:

1. Customer demand patterns are changing (what customers find valuable to pay a premium for) many industries are moving fast and the customer has her foot on the pedal
2. Companies are struggling to differentiate (I would argue because we keep asking the same boring questions).
3. The quality of the experience customers suffer through is on the decline
4. Competitive advantage is struggling (since everyone seems to be using the same data and technologies to brain power their way into the same “future”)
5. We are making these massive investments into data and technology-transformations that all (at least 88% of them) keep failing.
6. Data bias seems to be the current biggest threat to good outcomes from AI (and there is usually no customer in the data, only proxies).

I fully agree that the customer didn’t perform. We got lost in the weeds. But what companies need to be successful won’t be found by going backwards (or deeper inwards), nor by believing there is some magic in the data (we can already see that there isn’t).

What we need is for the ‘customer’ to show up much better by taking a generational leap in how we can get the partnership between the customer and the business to work.

Let’s get too it :)