Reza Soudagar - The Customer Experience Edge: Technology and Techniques for Delivering an Enduring, Profitable and Positive Experience to Your Customers

THE Customer Experience EDGE

Technology and Techniques for Delivering an Enduring, Profitable, and Positive Experience to Your Customers

Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer,
and Dr. Volker G. Hildebrand

Copyright 2012 by Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer, and Dr. Volker G. Hildebrand. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-07-178696-6
MHID: 0-07-178696-1

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To my biggest fan and best critic, my wife, Karen, for her encouragement and support.

REZA SOUDAGAR

To my patient wife, Rupa, who did the harder work of taking care of our kids, Rudradaman and Mandakini, so that I could write.

VINAY IYER

To my kids, Romy, Ryan, and Kay, for consistently creating the most important and most delightful experiences in my life.

VOLKER HILDEBRAND

PART I
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: THE NEW COMPETITIVE BATTLEGROUND

PART II
MAKING IT HAPPEN

PART III
TECHNOLOGY: THE CORE INGREDIENT

PART IV
SUSTAINING THE WOW

THE WORLD IN WHICH WE HAVE TO DO business today is certainly different. Dramatic shifts in technology, social networking, the democratization of information, globalization, and the recent economic climate have all altered the old ways of doing business and engaging with customers. In the 1990s, companies focused on reengineering their internal processes and operations to achieve greater supply chain and manufacturing efficiencies. In the early 2000s, the focus shifted to taking full advantage of the efficiencies that were possible by using the Internet to sell goods and provide services.

However, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, the focus is shifting from the inside out to the outside in. Our company, CEMEX, is a leading global supplier of building materials such as cement, ready-mix concrete, and aggregates. At CEMEX USA, we have realized that running the business from the customers point of view is our competitive advantage.

As I read the case studies and other insights in this book, I realized that we are not alone in this journey. The experience that companies create for their clients and prospects is driven not by industry, company size, or geographic location, but by a much broader customer perspective. CEMEX is in the building materials business, but when we are talking about the customer experience, our competitors are not only companies within our industry, but also FedEx, Apple, Amazon, Marriott, Disney, and other customer experiencefocused companies discussed in this book.

The people who deal with us day-in and day-out are also consumers of other products and services. The customer experiences that they realize in their personal lives have influence in their professional lives. When a consumer can easily buy a book or a video or reserve a hotel room through his smartphone, he questions why he cannot get the same level of effortless shopping when he is buying products from us.

The Customer Experience Edge is not just a high-level view of how organizations should improve the experience they offer their clients. I am a process guyI want to know what is behind the curtain. This book describes how the corporate culture, strategy, execution, and technologies need to be harnessed to provide a positive and profitable customer experience. While it is easy for a customer to ask for a better experience, we have learned, and this book shows, that it is difficult for a company to become customer-centricespecially if it has to deliver that experience consistently and profitably to thousands of customers.

First, there must be top-down support from management and then a bottom-up commitment from the organization. As my colleague Ven Bontha explains in the book, in 2003 we used a customer survey to determine what our customers liked and did not like about our service. Those data provided both top management and the rest of the organization with a road map on how best to implement an effective customer experience program.