Fast Talk: The State of the Customer Economy

Lightning Round #1: Your Take on the Customer Economy

Alan Webber (founding editor, Fast Company): Here's a simple exercise to get us started -- think of it as a lightning round. Tell us what's really happening today in the relationship between companies and customers. Pick three words that you think best describe what you see when you look at the customer economy. What's the actual truth of the situation?

Kelly Mahoney (chief marketing officer, Staples.com): Dynamic. Shifting rapidly. And a whole lot more complex. There's a reinvention process going on right now with customers: They are more empowered, and companies have not yet caught up to that empowerment.

Patricia Seybold (founder and CEO, the Patricia Seybold Group): Customer experience matters, and it's really hard to deliver.

Steve Elterich (president, eBusiness; operating committee member, Fidelity Investments): We're only in the second inning. The good news is that the game is just getting going. The bad news is that we're already playing catch-up.

George F. Colony (chairman and CEO, Forrester Research Inc.): I'll go one better than Steve. The game hasn't even started yet. It's still totally undeveloped. We're still sitting at campfires, dressed in loincloths, chewing on bones. It's very primitive stuff.

Angel Martinez (executive VP and chief marketing officer, Reebok International): This is my take on the customer experience: underwhelmed, overpromised, underdelivered, excessively high expectations.

Paul Cole (global director, CRM Practice, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young LLC): I'm usually the guy who says that the glass is half empty, but in this crowd, I'll have to play the optimist. I agree that we're in the first or second inning. And we have hit a lot of foul balls. But I think that the customer economy is a highly promising area, and I think that its promise is irrefutable.

Kathy Biro (cofounder and vice chairman, Digitas Inc.): It's been overhyped, and we've underdelivered. The idea was that we would reduce the costs of providing customer service through the Web. But in fact, we've simultaneously added costs and raised customer expectations -- which is the worst possible combination. Customers are expecting more and getting less, and it's costing companies more and more to deliver.

Jeet Singh (founder and CEO, Art Technology Group Inc.): If I look at the customer economy through the companies' eyes, I'd say that right now they have to deal with the point of maximum pain. The customer economy will generate much pain to the companies, but at this point, pain isn't the companies' biggest issue. The biggest issue is that they are disorganized. And, in turn, that disorganization is what turns into customer problems -- whether it's bad service or bad tires.

How Big Is the Gap?

Alan Webber: You all seem to agree that there's a gap between the promise of the customer economy and the performance. How big is that gap? How do you size it up?

Kathy Biro: The gap is huge. Just look at the email messages that pass between customers and companies. Most companies have been caught like a deer in headlights. They create Web sites and offer their customers a direct way to communicate with them. And now, when the emails appear, they're shocked! It's as if they thought that no one would actually write to them. Companies are giving customers more ways to complain and more ways to get frustrated. Here's the problem: If companies are going to deliver on the promise of a customer-centric view, then they have to disorganize by customer. And that's very painful.

Paul Cole: It's the people, stupid. You can take any management discipline from the past few years: total quality, reengineering, enterprise-resource planning, and now CRM. In every one of those instances, the failure has been addressing behavioral issues. The only way that CRM can add value is if the organization is reconsidered. Since the Industrial Age, we have been building a business model that was designed to help people create, produce, and deliver a product to the market. But that business model wasn't designed to deliver an enhanced customer experience. Until we get marketing, sales, and customer service converging in a way that adds value, we're going to keep disappointing the ultimate customer.

George F. Colony: There have been a great many stupidities in the past five years during this Web period. But one of the biggest was the idea that there was such a thing as a pure Web play. It's absolute nonsense to think that customers only want to interact through the Web. We have face-to-face contact, the telephone, mail, TV, and then the Internet. Customers want these channels to be woven together. They don't want one instead of all of the others.