A Singular Focus on Customer Excellence.

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"Customer Excellence provides companies with a purposeful foundation and building blocks to elevate the standard of business, inspiring customer love, integrating into their lives as trusted partners, and earning the right to consider them customers for life. —The Customer Excellence Enterprise

A Case for Change

Decode the core provocations, patterns, and possibilities reshaping customers, competition, and the future of growth.

Customer's have spoken. Experiential Commerce is here.

Customer expectations are in a perpetual state of elevation and evolution.
A select few "outliers" (think: Amazon, Apple, Ritz-Carlton) are raising the bar for everyone, across every industry.
Every interaction across every channel is now a brand-defining moment because customers are keeping score.
"Experience" is no longer a “nice to have”— it must be organic to value propositions, equal to brand and product.

Most companies aren’t structurally built to deliver this consistently.

Customer acquisition costs are exploding; costs to reacquire lost customers are exponential

AI homogenization risks making everything sound the same—eroding distinctiveness and human connection.
Digital tools and platforms are widely accessible—tech is no longer anyone's "secret sauce".
Crowded, hyper-competitive markets blur industry boundaries and accelerates commoditization.
Channel proliferation and weaponized marketing create noisy markets, drowning out messaging.

Differentiation and preference have never been more important.

CMOs, Marketers and CX Pros must step out of their comfort zones to catalyze and lead an Customer Excellence "Rebellion"

Adopt the Customer's Right to Reverence within culture, mindsets and ways of working; hold everyone accountable to deliver on it.
Take a structural and systemic approach to embed customer-centricity and customer experience at the DNA level.
Lead an enterprise-wide transformation--across leadership, organizational, operational, and commercial DNA.
Rewire how value is created by integrating Customer Excellence into the commercial engine and corporate success formula.
At the intersection of marketing, sales, and customer experience, turn experiential excellence into brand advantage.

Unlock the power of Customer Excellence as a unifying force, creating "outlier" companies that are predisposed to consistently deliver exceptional experiences

Research + Insights

Practice notes, best-practice research and case studies to support the journey to Customer Excellence.

Part 2/6. The Starbucks Mobile App: Societal Savior or CX Death Star?

By Wayne Simmons • June 12, 2025

Synopsis. The Starbucks Mobile App exemplifies how a highly successful digital innovation can inadvertently strain physical operations, impact employees, and erode brand equity. Its super-optimized, convenience-focused features drive increased order volumes from drive-thrus, mobile orders, and delivery, often overwhelming the in-store staff. The resultant bottlenecks and pressure on employees underscore the strategic challenge of balancing digital experiences with sustainable in-store operational performance to maintain both employee well-being and the integrity of the brand promise.

A starbucks coffee shop with people sitting at tables outside.

Part 1/6. An Open Letter to Starbucks: The Starbucks Customer Excellence Series

By Wayne Simmons • June 12, 2025

Synopsis. Presented as a letter from a long-time customer, this case examines Starbucks' (intentional or unintentional) shift from its original comfort-oriented "third place" brand proposition to a convenience-driven approach emphasizing mobile ordering, drive-thrus, and delivery. While these modern offerings cater to today’s convenience-seeking consumers, they risk eroding the emotional resonance that has long defined the brand. The dissonance between these priorities underscores a fundamental challenge for Starbucks: maintaining a balance between meeting the demands of convenience-oriented customers and preserving the comforting experience cherished by its legacy audience. Failing to bridge this gap could result in brand inconsistency, leaving customers questioning whether Starbucks sees them simply as transactions or if they are truly valued for their long-term loyalty and relationship.

[PRACTICE NOTE] Stronger Together—A Path to a Better Future for CX

By Wayne Simmons • February 25, 2025

[PRACTICE NOTE] Stronger Together—A Path to a Better Future for CX REFERENCE: “The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life”

[PRACTICE NOTE] The CMO's New Customer-Centric Imperative

By Wayne Simmons • January 18, 2025

Synopsis. With short tenures relative to others in the C-Suite, the role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is increasingly challenging. They must shift strategies and resources from platform to platform to match the ever-changing preferences of diverse customer cohorts. They must ensure that brand promises remain authentic and relevant in markets that are noisier and more crowded than ever. However, these challenges also present a unique opportunity for CMOs to renew their value propositions by being intentional about taking the lead in a critical transformation: guiding their companies through the structural transition from a tangible to intangible value exchange with today's discerning customers. As global economic activity and demand continues this seismic shift, CMOs are uniquely positioned to transcend traditional marketing boundaries to spearhead this evolution. To learn more order “The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life” at all major booksellers.

[PART 2] Are CMOs and Marketers Disposable or Indispensable?

By Wayne Simmons • January 12, 2025

The time to act is now, and those who embrace this change will future-proof their careers and their companies. The marketers who adopt this new model will be indispensable resources, the ones to shape the future of marketing by helping their companies create truly unique selling propositions, and defensible competitive advantages and deliver value in ways that transcend traditional product and brand factors.

[PART 3] Five Essential Shifts to Renew the CMO and Marketer Value Proposition

By Wayne Simmons • January 12, 2025

As the digital marketing landscape becomes increasingly commoditized, the future of marketing is experiential, human-centered, and customer-driven. To reset, rejuvenate, and future-proof their careers, marketers must take accountability for their own professional development. This requires upskilling in areas that go beyond traditional marketing tactics and tools. Marketers must embrace the experiential commerce model and integrate customer experience and customer-centric behaviors into the very fabric of their marketing strategies, making them an organic part of a new customer-centric commercial model.

Resources for Your Journey

Practical frameworks, diagnostics, and guides to help leaders operationalize Customer Excellence.

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5 CUSTOMER EXCELLENCE

VALUE LEAPS FOR MARKETERS

THE FUTURE OF MARKETING IS CUSTOMER-CENTRIC.

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Fit for the disruptive era of Gen AI and Experiential Commerce, the

authors of The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life present a five-point 2025 action plan to renew the value proposition and future-proof the career paths of CMOs and Marketers, equipping them to help their companies win by:

Making experiential factors organic to the value proposition
Breaking the product-brand paradigm to differentiate deeply
Making the bold leap from campaign to customer-centric marketing

Free: Download the full playbook

CXE Playbook

Experiential Commerce (n): A new era where experience itself has become a unit of value creation (or destruction). Since the mid-2000s, the World Bank has tracked this global shift from tangible to intangible value exchange. Experiential value now represents more than 80% of GDP in developed economies and 65% in emerging economies. In this landscape, differentiation comes less from what companies sell and increasingly from how they make people feel. This is the arena of Customer Excellence.

Experience Excellence. Because brands are no longer just heard, they’re lived.

Becoming a Customer Excellence Enterprise (CXE) isn’t just a cultural shift, nor does it happen by accident. It’s a structural and systemic transformation aimed at creating a very different type of company. Get the FREE download to start your journey today.

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