Have you read Trust Agents by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith? Do you follow Chris’ blog? I have been influenced by Chris’ writing on how to build trust with customers. I think he models a paradigm shift in how companies and individual consultants can think about their customers.
For larger companies, a question remains as to how to build a culture which will support the type of trust-building activities Chris advocates. In trust agents he describes how one of Microsoft’s employees was allowed to challenge Microsoft in the public arena.
Is your company ready to tolerate, even encourage such customer centric behavior from your employees? Are you? Customer centric sounds so obvious when it appears in a company value statement, but it actually challenges so many of our core beliefs about what is needed to be successful. Why, after all, can it be considered customer centric to encourage your customers to buy any of your products unless they really are the best on the market on a key dimension which matters (quality, functionality, price, value, speed, ease). How could that possibly be in the customers’ best interest?
