The Customer of the Future: 10 Guiding Principles for Winning Tomorrow’s Business, by Blake Morgan

Harper Collins Leadership, October 2019
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This book provides a framework to explore the ways your organization can improve the customer experience. Morgan’s prose is straightforward and engaging, and she clearly outlines the concepts she’s covering. There’s jargon of course, but it’s used appropriately – this isn’t one of those business books that’s full of acronyms and hollow phrases. The case studies provided enough detail that you could glean some useful info from them. 

For me, the biggest takeaways were some clear, short statements around what it takes to be focused on the customer. First, that most companies are product-focused, not customer-focused. In order to be customer-focused, every decision needs to be made based on what’s best for the customer, not what’s best for the revenue stream or even the company. She notes that it takes a willingness to focus on long-term value at the expense of short-term profits. That needs strong leadership, with goals and KPIs that account for the approach. In this model, they truly a tool for leadership to incentivize and operationalize customer-focused actions. 

The second is that customers move horizontally, but companies organize vertically. I knew this, but I didn’t have a clear way of encapsulating the conflict I’ve seen between organizational structure and the customer journey. If you’ve organized for internal operational efficiencies, your customers are going to have a disjointed experience. Thus, the best way to improve the customer experience is to organize to support the customer journey. The challenge here is that it means the employees are likely to feel the friction, and without good management and an internal commitment to addressing the friction, you have a new problem.

The last one I’ll mention is the observation that companies need to treat digital transformation as a state of mind, not an initiative. I’m not the only one who’s seen how you can catch up on significant technical debt or launch a suite of product improvements and still be behind the curve. The curve keeps moving while you’re catching up! To actually get ahead of the curve, or at least keep up with it, you have to constantly innovate. A model where you’re launching big improvements and going into maintenance mode for two years won’t position you to meet customer expectations in three years. 

As Morgan notes, becoming a customer-focused organization is “not easy, but it is simple.” Maybe you can’t rebuild your entire internal infrastructure to ensure employees have more customer data at their fingertips. But you can start prioritizing the customer over the company in making decisions about product roadmaps and allocating resources. You can lift your strategic gaze to look farther out as you set goals. This book will help you start.