At first glance many would assume that with a CFO background I wouldn’t have the right traits to be responsible for a customer experience management program. After all, customer experience is about people while finance is about numbers. Customer experience deals with emotions while finance involves facts. However, here I am today doing just that. I sit in front of customers and prospects weekly helping them answer the question, “I know it is right to invest in our customer experience, but how do I justify the economic value to my stakeholders?”
Posts Tagged ‘economic value’
Journey of a CFO to Customer Experience Expert
Friday, March 30th, 2012Wealth by Access
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010Venice rose to power and great wealth in the Middle Ages not because of its own natural resources or productive capacity—but because it uniquely provided access to the silk, grain, and spices of other lands.
Many of America’s greatest family fortunes can likewise be traced to the railroads that accessed the collective agricultural and industrial productivity of a growing nation—rather than to the farms and factories themselves.
Google serves as a contemporary example of this same principle. Google didn’t generate wealth by producing information, goods, or services. It did so by providing access to those things.
These examples and others highlight a fundamental principle of commerce. Often, the best way to create the most wealth isn’t to produce a limited number of things of value. It’s to provide access to a great number of things of value.
Economist Reports on the New Phenomenon: Big Data
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010The Economist issued a special report last week entitled “Data, Data Everywhere.” In this report, Kenneth Cukier, a financial and business correspondent in Japan, was interviewed to share his thoughts around how the superabundant growth of information is having a macro-economic effect not only on businesses but even society as a whole. Some have labeled this the age of “Big Data.”
Kenneth explains the Big Data movement through a business example. He reports that “Wal-Mart handles more than 1m customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes.” The CIO of Wal-Mart, Rollin Ford, wakes up everyday asking himself “how can I flow data better, manage data better, analyze data better?” Wal-Mart is not alone in asking how they can prepare for the age of Big Data.
