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I am a firm believer that people, not technology, are the driving force behind a company's success. Don't believe me? Let's take a look at one of the most people-focused organizations operating today: Change.org. Their entire purpose is to enable collective action to drive positive change; people connecting with other people, aided by technology. Completely user driven, their online petition platform enables people all over the world to create campaigns to accomplish incredible things: overturning the ban on gay Boy Scouts, defeating Thailand's blanket amnesty bill, saving Meriam Yehya Ibrahim Ishag in Sudan from execution on apostasy charges, and the list goes on. Over 100 million people have used Change.org since it launched in 2007, and it isn't because of the technology supporting it.6 The company tapped into an incredibly powerful force to help make a difference in the world: people.

Now, I know that not every company can operate like Change.org, but there are a ton of other examples where companies put people, and their experiences first. Take a look at companies like USAA and Trader Joe's, two radically different businesses, but with the same goal in mind: serving the customer. While they use technology to improve the customer experience, they never allow new technology to dictate or alter that focus. That's what I mean when I say companies need to prioritize people over technology. Every company's success is dependent upon people, whether they're customers, partners, or employees. Getting in that mind-set is essential to providing a better experience across every aspect of your business.

Technology Game Changers

Not every advance in technology, no matter how innovative, is a game changer. Similarly, technology itself is often not the answer. Sometimes even the seemingly best technology doesn't deliver. Remember Google Glass, the wearable computer and video recorder? The early adopters who shelled out big bucks were the stars of the party among the digital cognoscenti. However, the press attention eventually died down, and today Google Glass is an anachronism before its time. Google's product development team is already working on a new and improved form, but it wasn't a game changer then and it may never be.

Maybe the exception that proves the rule is the Apple Watch. It continues to attract customers despite its large price tag and limited functionality. The Apple Watch helped propel iOS 8 adoption to 81 percent by the end of April 2015.7 Still, popularity does not necessarily mean a technology is a game changer. Neither does a mob of imitators at different price points. The Apple Watch, and wearables as a general category, may eventually produce a revolutionary product or two, but that's far from a given.

It takes more than just cool technology and a flood of adoring press coverage to produce a product that becomes pervasive. Technology adoption is driven by unique moments where users experience a huge upgrade. Picture the first time you used an iPod versus a CD player or Uber instead of a yellow cab – these moments blended simplicity with a massive improvement in experience.

So how do we identify true habit-forming products or, more important, build them ourselves? Either business culture is advancing faster than technical innovation or innovation is advancing faster than the business. Neither situation is conducive to game changers, and cool alone is not enough. The world is full of problem solvers, but few problem finders. Do the research and discover the problems for which people lack a simple solution and build it. Take social media. People have always loved talking about themselves and sharing memories. Social media gave them an easy way to do it. Again, Kodak was so close, but never quite got social media. To a certain extent, social media allows you to continually reinvent yourself with each social interaction as Kodak customers did with the photos they took, showed, and saved. But better than paper-based photos, social media brings with it a dynamic network with a built-in audience: friends and followers and friends of friends and followers. What's not to like?

Nir Eyal addresses the quandary of creating addictive products that become pervasive in his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Portfolio, 2014). Habit-forming products are not necessarily synonymous with game-changing technology. Still, if we want addictive products that we can't put down, how do we create them and do so consistently? Simple: you manufacture them following Eyal's formula.

As Eyal explains in the book: “Today, small startup teams can profoundly change behavior by guiding users through a series of experiences I call hooks. The more often users run through these hooks, the more likely they are to form habits.”8 When joined to a compelling innovation, these usage habits result in a long-lived hit product. Companies do this through what Eyal calls the hook model, a four-phase process (see Figure 2.1) to stimulate propensity of customers to form habits around the product. “Through consecutive hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of unprompted user engagement, bringing users back repeatedly, without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging,” Eyal writes.9 To stimulate the hook cycle, Eyal created the hook model or hook canvas, which consists of four steps or phases: trigger, action, variable reward, and investment. The investment is something the user makes, which can be configuring and personalizing the product or even just learning to use it. For example, no matter how useful a watch is, it remains functionally worthless if the user hasn't made the investment in learning how to tell time.

Figure 2.1 Eyal's Hook Canvas Identifies Four Phases in a Loop

From the perspective of business outcomes, the trigger is the most important aspect of the product. Answering the question of why you want the customer to use your product – that is, how it drives profitability – and why the customer will want to use the product will help define and refine your customer focus and keep you accountable to delivering on your metrics for success.

Build People Relationships, Not Technology Products

I am not opposed to technology. To the contrary, I built my business on helping people use new technology effectively and efficiently. However, it is more important to build relationships with people, especially the workers and partners and, most important, customers and prospective customers. Pound for pound, these relationships will deliver greater value than the latest iPhone or Uber or whatever hot new technology that comes along. Apple doesn't succeed on the basis of cool technology alone. Apple delivers value by designing its products through the eyes of its customers and establishing a great connection through empathy and superior service. If your aim is to succeed as a customer-obsessed business, building dynamic relationships with people is vital. Once you have secured the relationship, you're better equipped to build an irresistible customer experience through the empathy you have gained.

Still, some technology can help you build these human relationships in key ways:

• Expedite two-way or even X-way interactive communications through teleconferencing capabilities.

• Enhance personal relationships through more frequent, timely, and deeper real-time communications.

• Tap human emotion and intellect through omnichannel experiences and virtual reality.

For the purposes of this book, I recommend using technology to advance and enrich the personal business relationship. Along the same lines, it should support and further your goals within the existing structure and environment.

Rules for Engaged, Customer-Focused Businesses

There are a handful of rules that can ensure you achieve and sustain a truly customer-obsessed organization. The first is to listen to the customer. Sounds pretty self-evident, right? But you'd be amazed at how many companies fail to do so.

What I mean is to truly listen to the customer. To do that, don't listen to the customer with an agenda in your mind or for the opportunity to interject one or two of your own ideas or make a sale. Instead, you have to listen to what the customer is actually saying right then, at that moment; what it means, what it might mean, and what it clearly doesn't mean. That requires you to take off your consultant-sales hat or your service-manager hat, or any other hats you might wear. Then, listen with your customer hat, which is simply that – listening to the customer. It doesn't involve objecting, selling, educating, or analyzing. It means listening to the customer and taking the appropriate action based on what the customer has said or maybe not said. If you actually listen, you'll figure it out.

Here are some other rules that will assist in establishing a customer-obsessed organization:

• No one owns the customer but someone always owns the moment. Seize each of those moments before somebody else does. Everyone in the enterprise should act like they own the customer and feel empowered to seize each moment expressly for the purpose of delivering outstanding customer service.

• Find your equilibrium. This really is about you and your organization. You need to define what your enterprise is and what it means to every customer. Unfortunately, for some customers, your organization may not mean much to them at all; it may be just another replaceable cog. (That may be the most important thing you hear – if you are astute enough to catch it, probe for more insight, and then act on it.)

• Identify and establish the natural rhythm of your organization – every organization has one. When people are puzzled by this statement, I point to the Salesforce product release cycle as an example of an organization's natural rhythm. Once you have identified your organization's natural rhythm, try to sync it with that of your customers, partners, staff, and other key stakeholders.

• Keep your bearings in a fluid landscape. Since the advent of the cloud and cloud computing, the business landscape has been as fluid as it gets. Things continually change. The only sensible response is to avoid setting your business process, architecture, policies, and procedures in concrete. Design your business for maximum flexibility, but also maintain consistency.

• Engage your people to the max. They want to be engaged and contribute in ways you may not even realize. Your staff produces the multiplier effect, the added profitable production that comes from the efforts of your staff, a gain MBA professors like to harp on. The more you can engage your staff, the more you can stimulate the multiplier effect.

• Tap into human emotion. Done in the right way, at the right time, it is the most powerful tool you have. Automation is great, but it has known limits and constraints.

• Be constantly alert to new, existing, and vampire competition. These are unnoticed competitors that ghost around in the background and shadows until they suddenly emerge into the light and quickly become a force to be reckoned with. These can often be the most dangerous, especially vampire competitors (those previously dead). They can and do arise; just look at Nokia and BlackBerry.

6

“Change.org,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change.org, June 6, 2016.

7

Zac Hall, “iOS 8 adoption bumps up to 81 % with help of Apple Watch,” 9TO5Mac, April 29, 2015, http://9to5mac.com/2015/04/29/ios-8-adoption-rate-2, October 10, 2015.

8

Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (New York, NY: Penguin Publishing Group, 2014).

9

Eyal, Hooked.