CX Engineering, another Corporate Training Program by Appleton Greene & Co

Customer-centric companies that are CX leaders have been shown not only to earn much higher Net Promoter Scores and Customer Satisfaction ratings but also to do a better job at reducing operating costs, mitigating key risks, commanding sustainable price premiums, and engendering more engaged workforces when compared to CX laggards, metrics all linked to earning supra-normal rates of return. Findings from cross-sector, industry and firm-specific studies also point to a myriad of best practices.

Only recently has the value revolution in business brought about a reconciliation of these divergent perspectives and increased the imperative for leaders and business teams to increase their customer-centricity and focus on CX radically. This is due to pervasive interest in learning about the operating models of customer-centric companies, new tools, technologies, and methods for advancing customer intimacy, and customer-centricity as a requirement for surviving in “new-game” competitive landscapes.

One obvious reason for renewed interest in building CX engineering capability enterprise-wide is the stunning rise in the market capitalization value of a handful of private-sector companies like Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and soon-to-be others, which are valued at over $1 trillion and whose leaders over the past decade have clearly embraced an outside-in, customer-centric operating philosophy to drive their businesses to these record heights, and some cases, to turn them around.

Any assessment of enterprise CX engineering capability would show this customer-centric mindset is firmly embedded inside only a handful of companies today, perhaps 15% of all businesses globally. Even corporations that have embraced this operating model still have strong pockets where some of their units or functional agendas slip into a customer-compelled mindset of simply asking customers what they want or remain firmly transfixed on their internally-driven objectives, incentives, and KPIs.

The future generation of customer-centric enterprises will be those that can create an agile, always-on value delivery system or VDS for always-connected customers, one capable of listening to customer signals from all interactions, touchpoints, and channels to derive keen insights about their unmet need states and occasions and translate these into solutions that deliver hyper-personalized CXs via user-relevant products, services and messaging working in close collaboration with ecosystem partners.