Steve Walker discusses the value of having good customer information during tough economic times with Phil Bounsall and Michael Good. They discuss the importance of building relationships with your existing customer base.
There are three ways companies can use customer feedback: to make corporate-level changes, to make functional area changes, or to make individual account level changes. The history of how organizations have used feedback provides a clear roadmap for how we will respond to the voice of the customer in the future.
Not that all businesses know this, but the evidence just keeps coming in - loyal employees in the right jobs help grow key customer relationships and produce better financial performance. We call this concept employee-customer linkage.
In 1999, Jeff Marr and I began writing the book Stakeholder Power. We began the book with a case study on Cisco Systems, a company that went from entrepreneurial start-up to the world's most valuable organization in approximately 16 years. One source of that success, according to our hypothesis, was their incredible way of "listening" to their stakeholders and then responding with innovative solutions.
