Imagine the following situation.

A man sees an attractive woman at a party. They talk and decide to have a few dates. After giving all the right signals for being a loyal, caring, trustworthy and relationship-oriented guy, he convinces her to spend the night. The next day he is gone and when she calls, it is clear he doesn't want to speak to her....

Customer-centricity starts by listening to the customer. But in many organisations it seems that the further you get away from the customer (research) department, the less people actually listen.

When it comes to managing the digital customer experience, there’s an interesting duality all of us need to deal with:

The book: Hug Your Haters: How to Embrace Complaints and Keep Your Customers, a vital resource for leveraging customer service as marketing

I love talking about the customer experience; I could sit for days, answering questions and discussing the finer points of this topic.

Looking beyond the doublespeak of customer-centricity, customer engagement, customer love to see what is truly there.

The start of a new year provides an excellent opportunity to reconsider old ways and adopt new practices. With that in mind, I’d like to suggest three new rules of customer engagement in 2016 for marketers.

How do you develop customer relationships that are strong and sustaining? How do you connect with people in meaningful, valuable ways? My new video in the series, Denise Lee Yohn Answers Your Brand-Building Questions, tackles this topic — take a look:

I hear you.

I hear you say that you (as an organisation) are customer friendly.

I hear you say that you (as an organisation) have a strong customer orientation.

Is your entire company - executives and employees alike - aligned with and around the customer? 

Do they know who your customers are? Do they understand the customer experience? How are you getting employees immersed in the customer experience? What tools or approaches have you been using? Are you looking for some new tools to help with this?