A Solopreneur Agency With a Singular Focus.
Deep Dive:
Experiential Commerce is here, and Customer Excellence brands are winning. Dig deeper into THE Playbook to find out how the consistently do it.
Lesson #1:
CMOs and Modern Marketers must lead the way in repositioning their companies to become predisposed to deliver exceptional experiences and differentiated value across the entire customer lifecycle.\
Lesson #2:
Expanding the Marketing Remit.
Moving Marketing Beyond the Funnel.
The Customer Excellence Enterprise is the single book on customer-centricity and customer experience that every CMO and Modern Marketer needs to read. As the definitive playbook guiding companies on how to help customers live their best lives, a central theme is to move marketing beyond the funnel to make customer-centricity tangible, sustainable, and real and customer experience an equal partner to product and brand in a new elevated value exchange with today’s discerning customers.
Future-Proofing Marketing Careers.
In markets that are noisier and more crowded than ever, and AI and automation are poised to supplant digital and omnichannel marketing skills, the future of marketing must be more customer-centric. The Customer Excellence Enterprise empowers CMOs and Modern Marketers to renew their value proposition to their companies, counteract the “AI Replacement Narrative” and future-proof their career paths.
Guiding Structural and Systemic Change.
Outlining the leadership, organizational, operational, and commercial facets essential for sustained success, The Customer Excellence Enterprise is a comprehensive playbook for any company seeking to differentiate deeply from competitors and win preferred positions in the hearts and minds of today’s discerning customers. With insights into how companies can become structurally and systemically predisposed to deliver exceptional experiences.
Lesson #3:
From nice-to-have to essential.
Customers today expect and rightly deserve to receive exceptional experiences across their entire relationship with companies. This elevated reverence and superior experience is possible with the framework provided in The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life.
An enlightening and pragmatic guide, The Customer Excellence Enterprise is for CMOs and Modern Marketers who aspire to elevate customer experience to a fundamental revenue accelerator, differentiator, and value driver across the entire customer lifecycle. With this fresh perspective on customer-centricity, companies can address the persistent disconnect between their customer-first claims and an often-disappointing reality. For companies of all shapes and sizes, this opens a world of opportunity where customer experience is no longer a nice-to-have, it becomes an organic component of brand identities and how companies show up in the world to deliver on their promises.
The authors draw on real-world practice and examples from customer experience “outliers”―companies renowned for consistently improving their customers' lives. Readers will also find:
- Practical strategies for building a case for urgency and mobilizing all levels of the enterprise to deliver tangible brand-aligned results.
- Winning methods to reconstruct brand identities around the deep emotional connections that lead to lifelong customer relationships.
- Insights into the habits and ways of working and success formulas from customer experience industry outliers.
Lesson #4:
Why are exceptional customer experiences still so rare?
The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life is a must-have for the boards of directors, C-Suite executives, line of business leaders and managers, Modern Marketers, sales teams, product leaders, human resources, customer experience, operations and other customer-obsessed professionals tasked with answering pressing questions like, Why are exceptional customer experiences still so rare?, If customers are truly the most valuable of corporate assets, why are they consistently being treated so poorly? and “How can companies create unique selling propositions that are truly unique?” This book serves as an invaluable tool and urgent call to action for anyone committed to elevating how customers are viewed, treated, and valued―the keys to creating customers for life.
Lesson Video:
Customer excellence brands are winning.
Lesson Reflection:
Key Questions for Leaders.
1. Do we lead with customer reality or company convenience?
When decisions are made, whose truth prevails—the customer’s lived experience or our internal assumptions and constraints?
2. Is customer experience a system, not a slogan?
Have we operationalized customer-centricity through structure, governance, and measurement—or does it live mainly in messaging and intent?
3. Can every leader connect their work to customer outcomes?
Do executives and teams clearly see how their actions affect trust, effort, satisfaction, and long-term value?
4. Do our brand promises match our delivery systems?
Is there consistency between what we say in marketing and what customers actually feel across channels, journeys, and touchpoints?
5. Are employees empowered to act in service of the customer?
Do our people have the clarity, tools, and permission to remove friction and deliver meaningful moments of care and value?
6. Do we measure what matters most to the customer?
Are our KPIs centered on what customers experience—not just what the organization produces or sells?
7. Is feedback built into how we operate, not just how we listen?
Do we have systems that continuously capture, interpret, and act on customer and frontline insight at scale?
8. Are we improving faster than customer expectations are evolving?
Does our pace of learning and change keep up with the accelerating expectations set by leading brands and everyday experiences?
For Customer-Centric Marketers
by Customer-Centric Marketers.
Real-World Experience Meets Academic Discovery.
The authors, Wayne Simmons and Tom DeWitt are both practitioners and faculty in the Department of Marketing at the Eli Broad College of Business at Michigan State University. Wayne is also a customer excellence and customer experience management leader in the chief marketing office (CMO) of Pfizer, the Fortune 50, #1 global pharmaceutical and life sciences brand. Tom is the founder of CXM@MSU, an industry-facing entity designed to advance customer experience management thought and practice, and the founder and architect of North America’s first master’s degree in Customer Experience Management (CXM) at the Broad College of Business, Michigan State University. Together, they expertly frame the complexities of consistently delivering a superior customer experience at enterprise and global scale and provide a compelling case for urgency for companies to take the journey to become a Customer Excellence Enterprise (CXE).
The Customer Excellence Enterprise is designed as an actionable playbook and includes over thirty-five “plays” called “bold moves,” which are collections of guidance, principles, frameworks, and examples that organizations can tailor to their specific context. As pragmatic sources of inspiration and “thought starters,” these bold moves serve as catalysts for the creative and courageous actions to deliver excellence across the customer life cycle. With the goal of infusing the spirit of helpfulness into the business world and catalyzing new cohorts of customer experience outliers, we believe this is not only a book to read but also one to apply.
Use these four separate diagnostic template sheets with your team to set priorities and build alignment by discussing and rating each bold move as it applies to your organization. Reference the page number under every "Bold Move" to find more context, direction, and case studies within the book, to then review, discuss, and assess together as a group.
