The Customer Era is here.

The way to win in business has fundamentally changed.

Here’s how:

In the Customer Era, customer experience and customer success are what’s driving successful businesses.  People are users first and paying customers second.  So it’s no surprise that successful online businesses obsess about delivering value, driving user engagement and building lasting customer success.  Commercial success then follows.  With most customer interaction now happening online or at least digitally and big data technologies widely available, businesses can understand customer interactions deeply and provide personalized, tailored engagement for every user.

Analyst Quotes.

Paul Greenberg, President of of The 56 Group, LLC.: what defines the Era of Customer Engagement more than anything is that customers are part of the company’s collaborative value chain. The customer selects how they want to interact with you, and hopefully uses your products, services, tools and consumable experiences to make that decision.

The IBM’s Institute for Business Value, in its 2010 CEO study found that the most important imperative for the next five years for CEOs – 88% of them to be exact – is to be closer to their customers.

Omer Minkara in his report on Customer Analytics found that companies which built a centralized customer intelligence database and incorporated customer insights into customer facing actions achieved 3x greater customer retention and 20x greater revenue growth on a per customer basis.

Ray Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO of Constellation Research predicts that the consumerization of the enterprise is causing a shift from transactional systems to engagement systems – resulting in new methods of furthering relationships, crafting longer term engagement, and creating transformational business models.

Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm and Managing Director, TCG Advisors observes the fundamental revolution underway in enterprise IT replacing the existing Systems of Record – those tools, repositories, and systems upon which organizations have built their business processes for the last several decades – with Systems of Engagement.

Dion Hinchcliffe, EVP at the DachisGroup: when we look back at the first decade of the 21st century, it will be obvious that a few momentous changes in the business and computing landscape occurred. Of these, one of the most profound has been a decreasing emphasis on systems of record and the move towards what are called systems of engagement. The goal is to connect customers and business partners together to achieve useful outcomes with the most cost-effectiveness and largest result.