Much like you, we have found that business often ignore customer attitudes and emotions, as most businesses still focus on the traditional axis of competition: Reasonable Quality, Reasonable Service, and Reasonable Price—which doesn’t really provide them with a complete customer relationship picture (nor take advantage of the opportunity to reduce their customer churn and improve their company’s financial performance).

What many businesses are missing—really missing—is the higher level view of customer and employee engagement. First, engagement has a rational or intellectual component. Second, there is an emotional facet, which is exhibited as attitudinal attachment or as enthusiasm. And third, there is a behavioral factor (e.g. likelihood to recommend, etc.)

For example, our customer loyalty and engagement experts have identified four emotional elements that are present in nearly every business relationship and that driver customer engagement. These drivers, which apply to nearly all industries, include: 1) Helpful service; 2) Feeling confident and informed; 3) Feeling valued; and 4) Feeling protected.
These customer drivers are common to any business. But, how a customer values them varies by age, length of the customer relationship, and geography among many other variables.

My point is that over time, businesses that make these types of emotional connections with their customers will engender a belief and feeling among their customers that their company genuinely cares about them. When that happens, the company’s customers will develop a strong emotional bond with their company, and the end result will be totally engaged customers who not only identify with but also express themselves by the company’s products and services they purchase and use.

For this reason, fostering true loyalty and engagement with customers through emotional drivers can no longer be ignored—it has become an imperative in 21st century business. And new technologies, such as those offered by Allegiance, can not only provide today’s companies with a complete picture of their customer and employee relationships, but can make all of the difference in helping business manage their customer and employee loyalty and engagement like the true business asset that they are.

Supports entrepreneurs within the organization – no matter their title
Encourages trial and error
Actively seeks to learn from mistakes
Seeks long-term relationships (with employees, customers and stakeholders)

That being said – I don’t often encounter that type of culture — If you look at this article on the recent Automotive debacle you can see how GM promoted leadership from their finance group — that gave them a leadership (and culture) that emphasized short-term thinking and short term shareholder gain. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/06/business/06motors.html

This mindset is endemic within organizations. Without going into too much detail I think that the economy is beginning to punish short term thinkers b/c the rate of change is increasing (think of media and publishing, open source software, open source hardware) which means the payoff from short-term strategies is now VERY limited.

All these examples have the quality of obviousness, of making you go, “Well of COURSE that’s a great strategy.” But when you think about it, there was nothing obvious about any of these strategies. Two of these strategies (Zappos and Fiskars) have the feel of trial-and-error management, and the third was the result of $45,000 worth of research and analysis.

For either the trial-and-error approach or the rigorous-planning approach to succeed requires a certain kind of corporate culture to be in place first, a culture that empowers middle managers, that controls departmental turf battles, and that rewards innovation — in other words, a company with enlightened executives above the product and marketing managers.

I bet that some middle managers will take the challenge of your three insights and come up with similarly brilliant strategies, only to see them fail because their corporate cultures don’t support them. And I also bet that if you interviewed the C-level executives of these three companies, you’d find unusually effective leaders.