Customer 3D creates a changed worldview of customers, which becomes a “wearable” for your organization. Once you embrace it, you wonder how your company lived without it.

Organizational advocacy for the customer will be the difference-maker in the future. Because you understand their needs more clearly, they will advocate for you in return. That’s the essence of customer loyalty.

Prevention is always better than repairing problems for customers. Empower employees to challenge and change current processes that create customer effort.

More than ever, customer success is the right that every seller ought to see as essential in its work for consumers.

The definition of great customer service is changing…for the better. The Customer 3D™ approach is taking suppliers’ expectations to a new dimension for their customers. What used to be acceptable in the product-centered world is being expanded by a new, customer-centered mentality. My book, Customer 3D: A New Dimension for Customers, was released today. I am […]

Many companies claim that they want to "exceed customers' expectations." There’s a problem with this mantra, however. It is based on the supplier’s view of what its customers expect. And this is inevitably shaped by the rules and procedures that have been built up to "protect" the business. There are built-in limits. Employees understand that […]

Customer service is being re-invented with an attitude that is very different from what we are used to seeing. Companies are beginning to think forward for their customers—to anticipate how they can become a more valuable partner. Steve Jobs once described the difference between TV and the Web as Lean Back vs. Sit Forward media. […]

The title of this post can be interpreted in two ways. First, it can represent the question “What needs to be changed?’ What are the situations or worldviews that are not working and that, therefore, ought to be improved? These are the ideas that we rally together to challenge and to make better. Secondly, it […]

All of us are well aware that basic knowledge is getting more basic, because it is more easily accessible. Google and other high-performance search engines have proven that. Customer 3D™ organizations are factoring this trend into the design of their services in order to creatively grow their businesses. It’s happening at two ends of the […]

I always want to know the back story of feel-good customer service stories.

Recently, a young traveler, with no money, was fed for free by the Wolfgang Puck restaurant in Chicago-O’Hare Airport. It’s a great story.

But I wanted to know how the executives of the organization handled the situation after it happened. I wrote to the Contact Us portal on the Wolfgang Puck website. Here is the response that I received from Lesley within a few minutes of my online request:

In December, a panel of speakers on customer service topics discussed “Is Customer Service the New Marketing?”. The panel makes the case for marketing how well an organization serves its customers. This is not new. It’s the traditional ideas being warmed over. The panel’s message to organizations is, essentially, don’t change your approach to customer service; simply market it better.

When you see bigger, you think smarter. When you reverse scarcity thinking and believe that what you are offering can expand into new markets based on anticipating and solving customer needs, then the market becomes much more boundary-less.

What it means to work with customers is inevitably evolving. It’s crazy to believe that the culture which a company had twenty years ago could connect with customers today. It must be adaptive.

Steve Jobs once described the difference between TV and the Web as Lean Back vs. Sit Forward media. Today,we have created a world in which access to everything is more direct—news, information searches, etc. From the standpoint of effort we have to put into it, we expect tomorrow's product or process to be easier and more intuitive for us. In this new world order, a Sit Forward organization must have a different metabolism to keep its customers involved.

Customer 3D organizations are re-visiting all of their traditional ways of doing business from the customers’ viewpoint – before customers question it themselves. It’s long overdue.

Thinking like a customer, when it is engrained in a culture, creates freedom – the willingness to point out shortfalls in current company processes and the passion to identify new opportunities that will make their company easier to work with.

Our perceptions of self-service are changing. However, self-service must be customer-centered. Companies must ask themselves whether the change saves customer effort, making the process more convenient & more straightforward.

The mindset of many futurists, unfortunately, relies on the tendency to see the future as simply a variation on the present. Today, while most product-centered companies are focused on the limited, “predictable” ways of working for their customers, another movement is emerging — Customer 3D™.

Customer 3D™ is delivering a more customer-centered alternative, in contrast to those organizations who still insist on thinking about customer service as they did years ago. In the 1960's, Bob Dylan wrote and sang, “Your old road is Rapidly agin' (The Times They are A-Changing)” but the message is still true. The future will belong to businesses that are more creative and empathetic than what we have accepted as good enough until now.

Most writers and speakers about customer service are focused on simply describing it, rather than paying attention to how to create the leadership characteristics that they want companies to develop. Their work seems to manifest itself mostly in generalizations and to imply that those generalizations will always work for your organization. Beware of what seem to be shortcuts.

All of us are well aware that basic knowledge is getting more basic, because it is more easily accessible. Google and other high-performance search engines have proven that. Customer 3D™ organizations are factoring this trend into the design of their services in order to creatively grow their businesses. It’s happening at two ends of the […]

The definition of great customer service is changing…for the better. The Customer 3D™ approach is taking suppliers’ expectations to a new dimension for their customers. What used to be acceptable in the product-centered world is being expanded by a new, customer-centered mentality.

Customer 3D is a new way of thinking and working for customers worldwide. It is a new dimension of performance for customers that only a few exceptional organizations have figured out. It shows the elements that other organizations can use to operate in this new dimension with more humanity. It is a model that is proactive. It is a strategy in which the first priority is customer success.