The Customer Wins! The Customer Wins!!!

HOT READS FOR THE PRACTITIONER

Title: A 180° Turnaround for Customers

Competencies: customer service, sales, marketing, strategic planning

Who benefits: everyone!

Consultant Usage: Vital resource for sales/customer service consultants and trainers, important background information for executive coaches whose clients are involved in sales/customer service and sales/customer service planning

What’s it about? Wouldn’t it be great if we had the power that vendors now possess?  I drool at the thought.  Well get ready.  Here it comes.

Today’s recommended reading, and it is highly recommended for those in sales and customer service, is The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge.

What if the customers advertised to the vendors?  What if the customers spelled out the terms?  What if vendors had to bid against each other for the privilege of serving YOU?

Of course businesses do that now.  But what if each of us, YOU and I, could do the same in a simple way.  Here is what the author has to say about the Intention Economy: “(It) is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos.  In the Intention Economy, customers don’t have to fly from silo to silo, like a bee from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In the Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy and sellers compete for the buyer’s purchase.  Simple as that the Intention Economy is about buyers finding sellers, not sellers finding (or ‘capturing’) buyers.”

“Soon consumers will be able to: (1) Control the flow and use of personal data, (2) Build their own loyalty programs, (3) Dictate their own terms of service, and (4) Tell whole markets what they want, how they want it, where and when they should be able to get it, and how much it should cost. And they will do all of this outside of any one vendor’s silo.”

Don’t fear us vendors.  We are free customers.  You don’t have to advertise to get our attention.  But hype and false promises aren’t going to work anymore.

We will have our own Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) system!  Can you possibly imagine how this will force banks, car dealers, satellite providers (yes you Direct TV), and with a touch of irony, even computer sellers and computer services to change how they will deal with us.  Darwinism will quickly cull those unable to deal with us in a whole new way.  Man am I feeling empowered already.  I feel like a revolutionary! Power to the People!

You want a glimpse of the future?  You want to see technology at its best?  It’s coming fellow consumers, and how it is going to happen in this just published book.  It gave me goose bumps reading it.  Hope it does the same for you.

Catch you later.

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.