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The past ten years have seen a profound change in business: The balance of power has shifted back to the customer; businesses are no longer in control – now your customer rules! When we wrote our first book, The Best Service Is No Service, in 2007 and '08, sites such as Facebook and Twitter were just emerging. No one understood the profound implications of social media, the Internet, mobile access, and other explosive new trends. No one predicted the profound shift in information and power in customers' hands.

Today it is critical to respond to this new world, or to anticipate it and get ahead of the pack. We decided it was time to write our next book. We no longer believe that B2C or B2B are accurate terms to describe the way companies and customers relate to each other. We now see only a Me2B model: The customer directs the relationship, and businesses need to think first and foremost from the customer's point of view.

At the same time, we've seen a trend toward poor consulting in the customer experience space, creating the risk that important insights that could help companies adapt and grow would be improperly dismissed as a flawed or trumped-up fad. The average customer experience consultant seems to be focused on repeated research around detailed change journey mapping and an obsession with measurement and monitoring. Others home in on culture or measurement and feedback systems to the exclusion of everything else.

We have nothing against customer feedback surveys, research groups, or analysis of the customer experience. Yet our observation is that the industry of customer experience is starting to be dominated by those with a vested interest in only one or two solutions. We believe that meeting customer needs in this new era where your customer rules requires a holistic and integrated approach, and that companies can save time and money by not making this a “research and customer feedback” problem. We suspected that there were some underlying principles to the customer experience that had never been clearly articulated but whose guidance was needed. So we set out to prove that companies could put these new principles into practice.

Our first book focused on simplifying, automating, and eliminating customer interactions, and at the end offered ways for organizations to maximize the positive effect of interactions when they occurred. This time we wanted to dig a lot deeper into what was required to deliver a great experience at every point of contact from pre-sales through using the products or services. Both of us run cross-industry forums where members seek out customer best practices and bring them into discussions as case studies. We knew that few organizations, even those with great reputations, rarely do everything well for the customer. Our goal was to bring all those stories together to define what the ultimate customer experience – and the theoretical company behind it – might look like. With help from our global LimeBridge partners, we interviewed organizations that seemed to be doing things well and tried to distill out their “secret sauce.” The more we researched, the more we observed dominant patterns, which we ultimately boiled down to the seven key customer needs we describe in this book.

We present both good and bad stories that illustrate these seven needs. We have no hesitation in naming the good companies or good stories. However, we have deliberately not named the protagonists in what we have called the bad stories. This is because some of them have been clients of ours and therefore we are restricted by contracts and confidentiality. Rather than name some and not others, we thought it fairer to leave them all unnamed and we hope you enjoy trying to work out who they are.

Our Unique Process

This remains a very unusual collaboration. We live on different continents and are usually sixteen hours apart: David in Melbourne, Australia, and Bill outside Seattle in Bellevue, Washington, in the United States. (David always tells Bill what his next day will be like!) We only got together once in the same room during the writing of this book. Everything else was done using Skype, shared Dropbox files, and other tools. The fact that we're able to work this way reinforces that, as in global business, incredible partnerships no longer need to be local.

We hope you enjoy exploring how your customer rules and the seven Me2B needs with us, learning from the many examples both good and bad that we've assembled here so that you can then build your own path to greatness.

October 2014

Bill Price

David Jaffe