Why Customer Worthy

Executives can hold meetings, engineers can create designs, manufacturers can ship state-of-the-art products, and sales people can hit the streets, phones, the web, the ads. Operators can even “stand by,” but if a customer doesn’t buy, the entire business has failed.

Imagine that you have had a discussion with your customers at a conference table. They have told you all about their experience with your products and service, including how they found and selected you, how they use your products, their likes, and their gripes. Now, what do you do with that information? This is where Customer Worthy comes in. In this book, you will learn a new nanoscale business model that leverages advances in technology, process design, and communications to help you chart your course to sustainable competitive advantage client by client.

The CxC Matrix that is introduced on these pages provides a futuristic view of your business through your customer relationships. In short, it will help you create a better way. It isn’t as futuristic as it seems, though. You can begin to implement this now, and it will not only make your customers’ lives easier, it also will make your life easier.

In the future you’ll see products and services with built-in sensors and the ability to morph functions, features, services, and resources throughout the customer’s buying cycle from product acquisition to product use to product disposal. Customer Worthy is your company’s introduction to the beginning of nanobusiness and customer management, where every business decision is traceable to its effect on customers.

With the CxC Matrix, each word in each message, each operational instruction in each device, and each clause in each contract can be care- fully, surgically, and calculably crafted to meet each customer’s preferences and circumstances. Pricing and servicing are precision-designed to meet your company’s and each stakeholder’s profit margin and business objectives.

Who should read this book?

Every decision maker at your company should read Customer Worthy. Each management team should come together to fill out your company's version of the CxC Matrix. This simple exercise exposes strategic conflicts, uncov- ers low-effort opportunities, and identifies areas to redirect spending—all centered around customer-centric activities. The result is a seismic shift in business direction and strategy, creating a company that is easier to do business with. It empowers managers to do things right but also to do the right things.

On this new frontier, every business needs a map. In an interview with Esther Dyson in Strategy+Business, she said, “Without a map, you can’t see yourself in context, whether it’s physically in space or in relation to all the other people you know. These little changes make a great difference, and then people start asking themselves, “How could things be done better?”

Customer Worthy provides you with just such a map—a framework and set of measures to support your business. Most importantly, this framework will fuel revenue growth and innovation.

Businesses cannot be successful without making their customers successful, and the CxC Matrix depicts customer success across each department and function company-wide.

Customer Worthy gets everyone in your company on the same page regarding customers—defining them, factoring them into decision-making, and measuring business success based on hard customer information.

The Matrix provides a means for all decision-makers to share a concep- tual model of this sensor-filled and smart-service design, enabling compa- nies to plot their current business state and evaluate ongoing decisions.

As your company customizes and modifies products and services to secure more business per customer and command greater profit margins, the number of variations and complexities brought about by all of the potential combinations and configurations may outstrip your ability to manage, predict, forecast, plan, and report.

The goal of any new business model and framework must be simplicity

—simple enough for all stakeholders to understand their roles and responsibilities. It even needs to be simple enough for customers to collaborate in the design of continuously improving solutions.

Customer Worthy’s CxC Matrix presents a business model diagram that is so simple everyone can understand it. At its highest level, this design has an entry point that everyone can participate in and agree on.

Managers—you are not alone

As a business decision-maker, do you feel like you are under a microscope? Do you feel like someone is constantly looking over your shoulder to scrutinize every decision—questioning every outcome or assumption?

Well, that feeling isn’t an illusion, and it isn’t going away. Business is going through a transformational period where processes and internal decisions are more transparent, where they can be viewed, critiqued, measured, and monitored by a growing audience of internal and external stakeholders, and eventually everyone, including customers.

The CxC Matrix has the ability to expose all decisions, criteria rules, responsible decision-makers, processes, and resources associated with each component of a customer’s experience. While the customer uses a product, researches it, shops, or buys, this ultimate transparency envelops his context, environment, situation, values, needs, disposition, conditions, and projections at the time of each decision.

Ninety percent of the technology is available today

The CxC Matrix does not require a major technology overhaul—just a rethinking or an adjustment to add the customer’s view and conceptually invite customers to the planning and decision-making table.

Customer Worthy provides a comprehensive and financially rigorous approach for you to manage from a customer-centric perspective. The tools provide you with the ability to connect strategy to execution in a manner that is easy for everyone to comprehend. The CxC Matrix maps system capabili- ties in a format that helps business and IT managers clearly delineate what is expected and what will be measured.

These tools are designed to overcome the business information technology conundrum. Technology: “What would you like to do?” Business: “What can I do?”

I suggest that marketing managers give Customer Worthy to their technology departments so that they can better understand how to evaluate tools and design systems with customers in mind. They will begin to develop a keen awareness for optimizing customer value.

Technology professionals should give Customer Worthy to marketing and other managers to help them express their needs programmatically and introduce systems thinking to their requests.

As for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) professionals, the CxC Matrix is the ultimate guideline and workbook for every customer contact enterprise-wide. The CxC Matrix can answer the questions that companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars chasing: “What does CRM look like? What is CRM? How do I grow performance per customer?”

The evolution of the CxC Matrix

The CxC Matrix started as a framework for applying artificial intelligence and predictive modeling techniques to customer management and communications systems in a variety of industries. The visual Matrix started as a framework to measure and present the results of complex modeling systems.

Initially it depicted results for stand-alone, departmental, and specific challenges such as pricing, advertising, distribution, product use, and customer service. The resulting success in any one of these areas consistently had an impact on other areas of the company. For example, more customers responded to advertisements, driving up traffic in stores, on the web, and by phone. This grew sales demand and accelerated inventory depletion. All of these consequences were subsequently modeled to depict company-wide impact.

“Customer” quickly became the obvious persistent variable in each model, so “customer” became the vehicle for measuring success from department to department.

As technology advanced and decision cycle times became shorter, the ability to model customers and scenarios as a stand-alone function outside of the business process stream became less desirable. Companies found greater success embedding decision-making in the process stream. Moving expert decision systems and experimentation into the process stream creates tremendous efficiencies in business processes and revenue potential. The CxC Matrix evolved into a multi-tiered method for designing solutions inclusive of customer preferences and value. The tiers presented as templates in this book represent different levels of CxC Matrix maturity, starting sim- ply with Visualize and growing through Analyze, Monetize, Prioritize, and Optimize stages.