Customer Worthy book Customer Experience Guide by mrhoffman

Paramount Market Publishing, Inc.
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ISBN 978-0-9819869-1-3
“The customer is the real boss. Mike Hoffman understands that and offers practical and
implementable solutions for aligning company strategies with customer needs and execut-
ing with excellence. A must read for any company that wants to win and make the
real boss happy.”
PAUL DEMARCO
Senior Director, Global Portfolio Management and R&D Business Process
Johnson & Johnson, Consumer and Personal Products Worldwide
“Hoffman’s Customer Worthy provides an intuitive approach and methodology to focus
on why we are in business—our customers!”
RICHARD C. MCMAHON
Chief Strategy Officer & Vice President, Corporate Operations
Bed Bath & Beyond
“Hoffman’s consistent, laser focus on the customer is put to practical use in Customer
Worthy. It firmly puts the customer in the right place for achieving business success.”
ANDY KAMLET
Director of Marketing, Microsoft
“The CxC Matrix provides the next generation of customer performance measurement and
resolves the time and expertise gaps between analysis, decision making, and execution.
Hoffman shows, not just talks about, how ‘continuous improvement’ really works.”
WEIMIN HU
Vice President, Decision Science, E*Trade Financial
“The key element here is using the CxC Matrix as a tool to make sense of a
cluttered multi-channel world—that becomes even more critical in today’s world of
social networking. The CxC Matrix quickly and simply exposes a vast amount of customer
opportunities that often go uncovered . . .”
AMIT SHANKARDASS
Chief Global Sales and Marketing Officer, Sitel Corp.
“Customer Worthy is a step-by-step guide to align customers and company expectations.
Hoffman does a brilliant job presenting a framework for every company and most
importantly, every individual, to gain better customer understanding.”
SCOTT OLRICH
Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, Responsys

Now you can equip all your sales, marketing, and service managers
with Customer Worthy. It will help them introduce new solutions
to your existing operations and open the doors for new business
development. You may also want to distribute the book to potential
customers to engage them in the design and innovation of new ser-
vices and help them understand the power of this marketing approach
and its implications.
A customized edition, with “Compliments of Your Company Name”
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Practical Books for Smart Professionals
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Customer
Worthy
Why and how everyone
in your organization must
Think Like a Customer
Michael R. Hoffman

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Copyright © 2010 Michael R. Hoffman
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All trademarks are the property of their respective companies.
Cataloging in Publication Data available
ISBN 13: 978-0-9819869-1-3 | ISBN 10: 0-9819869-1-9

This book dedicated to Corrine Hoffman, Mary Hoffman,
John, Sarah, David, and Julia Hoffman,
and James and Dorothy Ruediger.

Customer Worthy book Customer Experience Guide by mrhoffman

vii
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Preface xi
Introduction xv
Chapter 1 My Car Had a Conversation with My House Last Night . . .
When My Office Interrupted 1
Chapter 2 The CxC Matrix Unveiled 10
Chapter 3 Think Like a Customer 25
Chapter 4 Capturing the Customer Experience 35
Chapter 5 How Complicated Can One Click of the Mouse Be? 50
Chapter 6 Managing Customers Contact-by-Contact 69
Chapter 7 Nine Treatment Objectives for Each Contact 90
Chapter 8 The Customer Schematic 103
Chapter 9 The Customer’s Network 113
Chapter 10 Start the Revolution 120
Chapter 11 Customer Privacy is Nothing to Kid About 128
Chapter 12 Matrix Benefits and Use by Function and Department 140
Executive Management 142
Finance 145
Information Technology and Systems Management 148
Operations 153
Human Resources 156
Sales 158
Legal 161
Customer Service 165
Customer Relationship Management 170
Marketing Feeds Matrix Slots Contact by Contact 174
Marketing Performance Management 176
Index 187
About the Author 191

ix
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my customers, mentors, and partners who knowingly and
unknowingly helped validate the CxC Matrix design and metrics: Paul Ham-
ilton, Andrew Morrison, Philippe Mauldin, Robert Hall, Burrell Landes, Julie
Casteel, David Eckert, Kevin Ryan, Gwen Hall, Nick Jensen, Claudio Marcus,
Kari Regan, Evangelos Simoudis, David Raab, Tery Larrew, and Martin and
Regina Foy.
Much thanks and gratitude must go to my wife and family for their
support in putting up with me as I dissected every customer situation,
approaching everyone from salespeople to customer support representa-
tives, to see “how they do things.” Thanks also to my mother and in-laws,
and much thanks to everyone who shared customer stories.
Special thanks to Sears for the free lawn mower!

xi
Preface
Confessions of an Enlightened Customer
(by the way—why the heck am I on hold? )
Confession 1: I started writing this book while on hold with my cell
phone company, listening to horrific canned music and hearing this
recording every 90 seconds: “Your call is very important to us . . . You
can also get assistance online . . . Have you seen our latest ——— ?”
It is all about me, the customer
I started writing, “Twenty minutes online . . .now on hold 11 minutes . . . ”
So, why am I still on hold? Because it is the only way to resolve my issue
regarding the continued incorrect billing for my service, which is now a
whopping month-end bill of $1,700. It should have been closer to $40.
And the call-holding message keeps telling me: “Your issue can probably
be resolved online. Please visit us at XXX.com.”
So frustrating. I sketched out the spreadsheet you see below, logging my
time waiting for the phone company the same way I would log time for bill-
ing one of my customers. Using some generic numbers from my call center
consulting days, my frustration grew with every wasted minute because,
obviously, no one at the phone company seemed to have any interest in
calculating what a service issue costs a customer.

xii customer worthy
Monetize this:
Michael R. Hoffman Investment My Cell Phone Company
20 minutes preparation +
20 minutes online +
20 minutes on hold + 20 minutes call hold time = free +
11 minutes customer service rep 11 minutes customer service
interaction time = talk time =
My time: 71 minutes @ $3.00 minute Company time: 11 minutes @ $0.45 minute
My customer cost = $210 Wireless phone company cost = $4.95
customer cost @ $50 hr = $59.16
customer cost@ $10 hr = $11.43
Final Resolution 6-Month Cost
My time: 551 minutes Customer service talk time: 120 minutes
My customer cost = $1,653 Wireless phone company cost: $54
The $100 Billion Problem
I know I’m not alone in my frustration. The CSR on this call was kind enough
to remind me, “Sir, we have over 60 million customers to take care of, and
now they are waiting behind your call . . .”
Really? After a brief moment of feeling pity for her and the personal
burden she carried in supporting 60 million service-inflicted customers, it
occurred to me: “What if all 60 million customers were experiencing the
same on-hold frustration?” I quickly started my calculation, and the num-
bers floored me. My wireless phone company was costing its customers
$99,180,000,000. That’s nearly one hundred billion dollars that customers
pay in addition to their monthly bill! And what do we as “customers” get
in return? Please hold for the answer . . .
Here is the core customer problem: Companies—not just in the com-
munications industry—don’t keep score by customer. At the executive and
corporate levels, management does not measure the time customers invest
in researching vendors, building their solutions, using services, resolving
issues, the efforts a customer makes to assist in problem resolution, or the

Preface xiii
sacrifices and inconveniences a customer pays. This strategy worked until
recently when the World Wide Web gave customers a voice and a platform
to speak to one another, news agencies, and prospective customers.
Customer satisfaction surveys—Net Promoter Score, J.D. Power, and other
“everything is all right” customer satisfaction measurement methods—miss
the point. They are too far away from the customers, the interactions, and
the phone call. The “long tail” is on the phone right now. This is “long tail”
meets the Pareto Principle.
Key Takeaway: Poor customer experience design is expensive for every-
one, but it is most expensive for customers.
This is why the CxC Matrix that you will learn about in this book is so
important. It can be used to fix the customer problems and improve service
delivery from the moment a customer begins the journey to fulfill a need
all the way to product or service disposal.
Poor customer experience leads to incredible expense—not just for com-
panies, but for customers. (At the time of this writing, the wireless phone
company’s annual report says that it spent $21 billion in “selling, general, and
administrative expense.”) Even if I discount the cost of my personal experi-
ence by 90 percent, it means that my wireless company cost its customers
nearly ten billion dollars that goes unreported.
The point is that with all of the investments in product development,
sales, marketing, and customer service systems, companies continue to
waste an unfathomable amount of customer time—waiting for the techni-
cian to arrive to load software or install cable, waiting for a salesperson to
return a call, waiting for the answer to an emailed question, trying to figure
out how to use a product.
Will I ever do business with the wireless phone company again? Reluc-
tantly, I already have.

xv
Introduction
Executives can hold meetings, engineers can create designs, manu-
facturers can ship state-of-the-art products, and sales people can hit
the streets, phones, the web, the ads. Operators can even “stand by,”
but if a customer doesn’t buy, the entire business has failed.
Imagine that you have had a discussion with your customers at a conference
table. They have told you all about their experience with your products and
service, including how they found and selected you, how they use your prod-
ucts, their likes, and their gripes. Now, what do you do with that information?
This is where Customer Worthy comes in. In this book, you will learn a new
nanoscale business model that leverages advances in technology, process
design, and communications to help you chart your course to sustainable
competitive advantage client by client.
The CxC Matrix that is introduced on these pages provides a futuristic
view of your business through your customer relationships. In short, it will
help you create a better way. It isn’t as futuristic as it seems, though. You
can begin to implement this now, and it will not only make your customers’
lives easier, it also will make your life easier.
In the future you’ll see products and services with built-in sensors and
the ability to morph functions, features, services, and resources throughout
the customer’s buying cycle from product acquisition to product use to
product disposal. Customer Worthy is your company’s introduction to the
beginning of nanobusiness and customer management, where every busi-
ness decision is traceable to its effect on customers.
With the CxC Matrix, each word in each message, each operational

xvi customer worthy
instruction in each device, and each clause in each contract can be care-
fully, surgically, and calculably crafted to meet each customer’s preferences
and circumstances. Pricing and servicing are precision-designed to meet your
company’s and each stakeholder’s profit margin and business objectives.
Who should read this book?
Every decision maker at your company should read Customer Worthy. Each
management team should come together to fill out your company's version
of the CxC Matrix. This simple exercise exposes strategic conflicts, uncov-
ers low-effort opportunities, and identifies areas to redirect spending—all
centered around customer-centric activities. The result is a seismic shift in
business direction and strategy, creating a company that is easier to do
business with. It empowers managers to do things right but also to do
the right things.
On this new frontier, every business needs a map. In an interview with
Esther Dyson in Strategy+Business, she said, “Without a map, you can’t see
yourself in context, whether it’s physically in space or in relation to all the
other people you know. These little changes make a great difference, and
then people start asking themselves, “How could things be done better?”
Customer Worthy provides you with just such a map—a framework and
set of measures to support your business. Most importantly, this framework
will fuel revenue growth and innovation.
Businesses cannot be successful without making their customers suc-
cessful, and the CxC Matrix depicts customer success across each depart-
ment and function company-wide.
Customer Worthy gets everyone in your company on the same page
regarding customers—defining them, factoring them into decision-making,
and measuring business success based on hard customer information.
The Matrix provides a means for all decision-makers to share a concep-
tual model of this sensor-filled and smart-service design, enabling compa-
nies to plot their current business state and evaluate ongoing decisions.
As your company customizes and modifies products and services to

Introduction xvii
secure more business per customer and command greater profit margins,
the number of variations and complexities brought about by all of the poten-
tial combinations and configurations may outstrip your ability to manage,
predict, forecast, plan, and report.
The goal of any new business model and framework must be simplicity
—simple enough for all stakeholders to understand their roles and respon-
sibilities. It even needs to be simple enough for customers to collaborate in
the design of continuously improving solutions.
Customer Worthy’s CxC Matrix presents a business model diagram that
is so simple everyone can understand it. At its highest level, this design has
an entry point that everyone can participate in and agree on.
Managers—you are not alone
As a business decision-maker, do you feel like you are under a microscope?
Do you feel like someone is constantly looking over your shoulder to scru-
tinize every decision—questioning every outcome or assumption?
Well, that feeling isn’t an illusion, and it isn’t going away. Business is
going through a transformational period where processes and internal deci-
sions are more transparent, where they can be viewed, critiqued, measured,
and monitored by a growing audience of internal and external stakeholders,
and eventually everyone, including customers.
The CxC Matrix has the ability to expose all decisions, criteria rules,
responsible decision-makers, processes, and resources associated with each
component of a customer’s experience. While the customer uses a product,
researches it, shops, or buys, this ultimate transparency envelops his context,
environment, situation, values, needs, disposition, conditions, and projec-
tions at the time of each decision.
Ninety percent of the technology is available today
The CxC Matrix does not require a major technology overhaul—just a rethink-
ing or an adjustment to add the customer’s view and conceptually invite

xviii customer worthy
customers to the planning and decision-making table.
Customer Worthy provides a comprehensive and financially rigorous
approach for you to manage from a customer-centric perspective. The tools
provide you with the ability to connect strategy to execution in a manner that
is easy for everyone to comprehend. The CxC Matrix maps system capabili-
ties in a format that helps business and IT managers clearly delineate what
is expected and what will be measured.
These tools are designed to overcome the business information technol-
ogy conundrum. Technology: “What would you like to do?” Business: “What
can I do?”
I suggest that marketing managers give Customer Worthy to their tech-
nology departments so that they can better understand how to evaluate
tools and design systems with customers in mind. They will begin to develop
a keen awareness for optimizing customer value.
Technology professionals should give Customer Worthy to marketing and
other managers to help them express their needs programmatically and
introduce systems thinking to their requests.
As for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) professionals, the CxC
Matrix is the ultimate guideline and workbook for every customer contact
enterprise-wide. The CxC Matrix can answer the questions that companies
spend hundreds of billions of dollars chasing: “What does CRM look like?
What is CRM? How do I grow performance per customer?”
The evolution of the CxC Matrix
The CxC Matrix started as a framework for applying artificial intelligence and
predictive modeling techniques to customer management and communica-
tions systems in a variety of industries. The visual Matrix started as a frame-
work to measure and present the results of complex modeling systems.
Initially it depicted results for stand-alone, departmental, and specific
challenges such as pricing, advertising, distribution, product use, and cus-
tomer service. The resulting success in any one of these areas consistently
had an impact on other areas of the company. For example, more customers

Introduction xix
responded to advertisements, driving up traffic in stores, on the web, and
by phone. This grew sales demand and accelerated inventory depletion. All
of these consequences were subsequently modeled to depict company-wide
impact.
“Customer” quickly became the obvious persistent variable in each
model, so “customer” became the vehicle for measuring success from
department to department.
As technology advanced and decision cycle times became shorter, the
ability to model customers and scenarios as a stand-alone function outside
of the business process stream became less desirable. Companies found
greater success embedding decision-making in the process stream. Moving
expert decision systems and experimentation into the process stream cre-
ates tremendous efficiencies in business processes and revenue potential.
The CxC Matrix evolved into a multi-tiered method for designing solutions
inclusive of customer preferences and value. The tiers presented as templates
in this book represent different levels of CxC Matrix maturity, starting sim-
ply with Visualize and growing through Analyze, Monetize, Prioritize, and
Optimize stages.

Chapter 1
My Car Had a Conversation with my House
Last Night ...when My Office Interrupted
Everything is a computer—your car, phone, television, music player, radio,
and so on. With the expansion of WiFi, even more common objects will
not only be computerized; they will be networked. You know that security
doohickey that stores attach to clothes, expensive items, and controlled
substances? Imagine your Blackberry and Outlook calendars simultaneously
updated and “aware” of new items you have purchased the moment you
cross the threshold of your home with times and days that you should take
your new prescription, or your calendar automatically reminding you when
to take your medication through a text message sent to your car, cell phone,
computer, and music player.
Now, imagine that all of the technology that surrounds you—your PC,
phone, radio, car keys, PDA, car, television, and the doohickey in the bag—is
monitoring your activities and controlling key aspects of your life (depend-
ing, of course, on the settings and who set them).
Your phone flashes: “Take X pill.” Ignored, your phone flashes and rings
five minutes later, “Did you take your X pill today?” You walk into your
kitchen past your microwave that is blinking and flashing: “Urgent Mes-
sage: Prescription.”
Customer experience is the next big thing. Inanimate objects are getting
smarter. Remember when TVs had dials and clocks had hands? Now, your
TV obeys your command and plays the shows you want to see when you
want to see them in the order you dictate and without commercials. Look
at your bathroom scale. Look at your car. Look at the security tag in the box

customer worthy
of aspirin. The experience is different because there is intelligence around
the customer, built into everything, constantly shaping the way customers
see and interact with the world.
Caller ID, transparency, physical household, and addressability
All customer processes—business, consumer, and government—are subject
to overhaul. The vast improvement in cars and computer usability through
USB ports points to the ease of computer components and user adoption.
It’s the emergence of the Trifecta, the next stage of the evolution, where
products are speaking to each other on behalf of the customer and are
becoming self-configuring based on a customer’s profile. This goes beyond
the car that adjusts to three users. It speaks to design function with such
questions as: “Do I hit a 1, 2, 3 button?” or “Does the seat measure me?” or
“Does the car hear a voice command, or does it simply recognize my voice
and dimensions and adjust my seat accordingly?”
This type of awareness is one in which people are defined by their
devices, and services are configured as their personal network with a digi-
tal “fingerprint” representing their various connections, activities, and user
preferences. This is the next wave of technology, societal, and business
development. It will vastly change the nature of the way products are con-
sumed, repaired, purchased, reused, and resold. This also has tremendous
implications for customer privacy, security, and governance.
The emerging business ecosystem is quickly becoming a reality. Early
adopters, savvy technology geeks, and children expect technology, com-
munications, and trusted companies to flawlessly work on their behalf
with minimal disruptions or inconveniences. In this new environment,
information and trust are rationed out to companies that contribute to the
customer’s network and respect the customer’s boundaries. These trusted
companies also proactively protect and represent the customer’s values and
best interests, often without the customer’s acknowledgement, but always
with the customer’s permission.
In this new environment, the customer is regarded as the arbiter of

1: My Car Had a Conversation with My House Last Night . . .
business decisions. The primary criterion for business success is this: Is the
result Customer-Worthy?
“The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us, even now in this very room.You
can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your televi-
sion.You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you
pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind
you from the truth.”
—Morpheus, in The Matrix
Fast forward to 2018 and the diary of a day in the life of
your customer, Neil
( Excerpted from the short story, Evil Twin, by Michael R. Hoffman)
Standing on the light rail train, heading into the city, my folder vibrates, and
I see the light flashing through the unzipped space in my backpack. Tilting
back, I try to glance at the message. The light is green, so it might be home.
I reach through the unzipped corner and pull the screen half-out, bending
it back just enough to see the address line.
The Wall Street Journal I grabbed at the train station must have had
an interactive RFID coupon for 30 percent off the new combo meal at the
Starbucks across the street from my office.
I double tap the “Y” on the coupon with my index finger, and the confir-
mation message alerts me to pick up my sandwich at counter 3. The flashing
link below the confirmation also displays a message telling me that I have
been entered in a contest for a travel mug with an SD chip and wireless con-
nectivity to play videos and news clips. “You must be present to win. Your
current odds of winning are 71:1. This could be your lucky day!”
I jog across the street, gnawing at my sandwich, tasting the melted
cheese, ham, and a bit of brown paper.
As I approach the lobby, my folder vibrates (I’m sure it flashes), and I

customer worthy
hear, “37 days consecutive on-time attendance. 23 more days to a new golf
putter, day spa, flowers home, or grab bag gift, care of Human Performance
Resources. Would you like to choose your gift now?”
“Oh, crap!” I mutter as I grab for my ear. I forgot to turn off my office ear-
piece again. I push the toggle back twice. I think that’s how I “mute all.”
As I walk into my office, I quickly look left and right and softly say,
“Holy stubby Santa!” I pause. Nothing. As I grab my ear and fiddle with
the toggle, I hear a soft tone in my left ear and an even softer click on my
right. “There you go.”
I repeat “Holy stubby Santa,” and my desk’s half-panel wall begins to
glow almost completely green. “Looking good,” I say out loud to no one. I
hear three quick beeps in my left ear, and a soft, female voice whispers, “3
urgent, 6 exec, 13 office messages, 31 unknown.”
I plop down in my chair and run my finger across the green screen.
Tiny text blurbs pop-up and disappear as my finger moves along. My eyes
focus on the red brown blotch just left of the center of the screen. I tap the
blotch and spread my two fingers apart to zoom in and open the under-
performing area.
The screen light shudders. Then, a list of “recommended actions” appears
in a window overlaying the area. The list, numbered from 1 to 6, includes
actions and probable outcomes for each item, presented as percentages. At
the bottom of the semi-transparent window where “7” would be, the screen
highlights “New” and “Other.” Hmmm. . . . I quickly drag my finger across
actions “1, 2, 3” and hold it. I pause for a second, and the screen flashes
“confirm” as the female voice whispers, “Confirm?” in my left ear.
“Confirm.”
“Good sign,” I think to myself as the lower traffic light-looking gauge
has a “97.5%” next to the green signal and “2.5%” hovering between the
yellow and green.
“Not bad, 97.5% of processes running on plan 7 months before the big
day; 2.5 out of alignment.”
I touch the 2.5% and drag my finger to the lower right “Me” button. I
can’t help but smile as the “Me” pops up “$48K, $6k, $26K,” in blue, red,

and green respectively, representing my slice of the projected earned bonus,
potentially forfeited bonus, and potential group bonus.
7:10 pm: I lean my backpack against the car, and along with the sound
of the door lock opening, the car’s dashboard screen is already flashing. I
slide in and look at the pulsing message. “MUNICIPAL ALERT MUNICIPAL
ALERT” is scrolling across my dashboard in red, bold letters against a sky
blue background. I tap the screen, and a message flashes in black letters,
“Spring Baseball? Justin Y N Hillary Y N Confirm.” I quickly tap both “Ys” and
“Confirm.” “Confirm debit $625 Citi Y N” pops up on the screen, and I tap “Y,
Confirm.” The screen then flashes some message about verification among
4 registered items blah, blah, blah and a touch box below that says “Accept
Not Accept.” I tap “Accept” and “Start Car,” cleverly using both hands. Nothing
happens, and the warning light flashes in synch on the dashboard and the
dome light. “External screens must be turned off to start ignition.”
“C’mon, you know what I meant!” I holler back. Nothing.
I tap the flashing and enlarged “Screen Off” button then “Start Car.”
As I turn to enter the mall on the way home, the car’s in-dash, yellow
message light flashes quickly, followed by a high-pitched man’s voice asking,
“Offers? Yes? No?” Just as I say, “Yes,” the voice changes to my wife Eve’s
voice and says “Groceries” in a soft calming tone.
I say, “No groceries” and hear a beeping phone ring tone fill my car, then
Eve’s real voice, “Hi, Neil. Honey, are you going to be home soon?” Not really
paying attention, I respond, “I’m not picking up groceries.”
“What?”
I park close to the hardware store and tap “Car Off.” Simultaneously, the
car windshield screen projects a lightly flashing message “Offers? Yes? No?”
to which I say “Yes.” Two large buttons then pop up on the screen: “Some”
and “All.” I say “Some” out loud, and the names and images from stores in
the mall from my preferred list pop up. They are numbered 1 to 5. I say, “1,
3” for the grocery store and the liquor store. Another message then pops
up with “1. Bank $25 OK 2. Chinese Restaurant $10 OK?” “No,” I grunt as I
step out of the car.
As I enter the store, I hear a faint voice in my left ear saying “Coupons?”

customer worthy
I realize that I forgot to turn my ear phone off. “No, thank you” I say quickly
and tap my phone off.
I just hate being tracked as I go through the store.
The future is now
This “day in the life” excerpt provides a window into an evolved customer-
to-company relationship and a set of experiences that in the not-too-distant
future will be pervasive, intelligent, highly personalized, multi-device, and
multi-member.
The full spectrum of technology used in the excerpt is already available:
WiFi;
Bluetooth;
Encryption;
Customer profile-driven personalization, self-configuring, rules-
driven marketing and sales offer systems;
Visual business performance dashboards with touch screen report-
ing;
Multi-media, network-connected cars; and
Multi-device coordination and synchronization.
Neil’s day depicts a higher evolution of networked customer, where the
buyer’s experience, activities, environment, human-to-device and human-to-
human interactions, movements—and even occasionally thoughts and reac-
tions—are digitally recorded (either by mistake or intentionally) and stored
in distributed connectable databases.
How does a company participate in this network? Who is in charge of
coordinating the contacts, messages, offers, and customer service? How can
marketing and technology work together to make sure the customer is well
served at the same time the technology is used effectively and efficiently?
Companies must begin now to plan how they will participate in this
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

interconnected, always-on, highly personalized network and whether it is
an option not to participate in a customer’s network.
Non-participation probably isn’t an option. A company that chooses not
to participate in the customer network is today’s equivalent of a company
choosing not to have a phone. It’s worse than not having a website and not
using email because the purchase transaction and the execution mechanism
will become more tightly linked—like the Municipal Recreation Department
transaction in the above example that was extremely convenient. Automatic
payment, service, and payment reminders that follow customers around
and are delivered through every form of device and medium will become
standard practice.
Customers are morphing marketing, customer service, and product
usage contacts at light speed. WiFi, intelligent devices, and personal com-
munication networks are seamlessly linked. Your laptop synchronizes to your
phone/PDA/GPS, which synchronizes with your car computer and GPS.
Of course all of this information circulating among devices, passing
through airwaves, then passed from system to system and company to
company, poses a series of new challenges and problems.
Customer promises
The Evil Twin excerpt presents a number of service, delivery, and product
fulfillment challenges for all of the companies and parties involved. Let’s
call them customer promises. For example, one of the challenges of the
Starbucks’ Wall Street Journal interactive offer plus sweepstakes entry is
coordinating the messages, resources, and products to create a highly suc-
cessful, attention-getting, impulse offer. The offer’s success requires coordi-
nation not just across companies but also across devices, media, channels,
systems, departments, and functions.
What if Neil shows up at Starbucks window 3, and they don’t have his
sandwich? What if the worker at window 3 has no record of the sandwich
order, which, incidentally, was debited from his account automatically when
he walked up to the counter?

customer worthy
No sandwich = a bad experience. Account debited = a worse experience.
Spending time to retrace the offer, order, sweepstakes entry, debit, and credit
creates a still worse experience for the customer and the Starbucks employee
caught in the middle.
And what happens to the Wall Street Journal pay-for-performance adver-
tising campaign results? Should Neil’s response be pulled out? Just how
do you do that when the WSJ system checked that Neil responded . . . and
he did?
Is Neil still entered in the contest for the mug?
You might say, “Who cares?” Well, Neil does! And so do the paid spon-
sors of the mug and advertising promotion who were going to give Neil a
mug regardless of the sweepstakes drawing results simply because Neil has
a high projected lifetime value for their financial services. They want a piece
of Neil’s attention, and they funded the Starbucks discount, the Wall Street
Journal advertisement, the mug design, the delivery, and the service. The
mug also ensured that the financial services company could promote its
services by sending messages programmed to appear on the mug’s screen.
The financial services company valued and specifically targeted Neil, and the
entire effort was focused on creating a dedicated channel to communicate
directly with Neil.
The cost of privacy
In Neil’s story, privacy has a price—or a value. In exchange for verification
information, customers share personal information with trusted advisors. In
fact, it’s very likely that a whole new industry will spring up in the personal
network identification business with businesses responsible for insuring and
monitoring networks, personal data exchanges, commercial transactions,
and risk mediation.
As customers and citizens, we will all have to decide whether we want to
give up this level of “privacy” in exchange for convenience, entertainment,
stimulation, and attention.

How will you configure systems and processes to manage customer
demand for personalized offers, logistics, pricing, packaging, delivery, and
service? How should you decide which technologies to pursue and which
processes to change, adapt, and invest in? What profit gains and cost sav-
ings should you expect?
This is the role of the CxC Matrix—a methodology and framework
designed to help you plot, visualize, analyze, monetize, prioritize, and opti-
mize all customer contacts customer-by-customer and contact-by-contact.

10
Chapter 2
The CxC Matrix Unveiled
Right this minute, your company is missing hundreds of opportunities to
grow revenue and reduce costs. Hundreds of assets are being under-used.
Worse yet, these assets are completely paid for, and in the time it took
you to read to this word, hundreds more opportunities were lost.
What if you could coordinate the messages across each of the channels
for advertising, promotion, sales, and operations? What if the call-waiting
message, the “thank you” at the store, the owner’s manual, and the welcome
letter were all presented as a unified message and single call to action? What
would the impact be on the rest of your business?
Contact: Any connection between a customer and a company, its products,
services, and partners. The CxC Matrix classifies contacts along two major di-
mensions: channel and consumer cycle. Consumer cycle reflects the buying
cycle of customer needs, attributes, and processes, while channel represents
company resources and behavior.
Each contact a customer has with your company, its products, its ser-
vices, and its partners is an asset and a pivot point for company success.
Every interaction has tremendous revenue opportunity, along with enormous
risk potential. Yet customer interactions are the most underused asset in
most companies.
Most marketers understand the importance of thinking like a customer,
but adopting the “Think Like a Customer” mindset probably requires a tre-
mendous shift in many other parts of your company including manage-

2: The CxC Matrix Unveiled 11
ment, operations, and finance. It’s a cultural shift, not a systems upgrade
or replacement, not a firing and rebuilding. It’s a paradigm shift in mindset,
developing an inquisitiveness focused on what we can do better for custom-
ers at each contact.
What would the value of a 0.05 percent improvement in customer flow,
conversion rate to purchase? What would an additional 0.05 percent increase
in referrals do to your bottom line?
What if each individual message was refined and scoped specifically for
every contact, crafted based on the customer’s interests and profile—hitting
each customer’s value-set spot on, making the customer feel exceptional and
trusting of your company?
Who could ever compete with you if you had all of that going for you?
Who could match your ability to manage the customer experience? This
competitive advantage comes from your company’s ability to factor the
customer’s interest into each customer contact, leveraging technology and
design to get the highest return per interaction.
Excellent, profitable customer experiences are about winning. Profitable
growth and sustainable competitive advantage come from mutual win-wins
for the customer, wins for the employee, wins for the company, and wins for
its partners and shareholders. Collectively, how do we move this customer
further along in the relationship? How do we create urgency across all of
the contact points?
The CxC Matrix clearly delineates all of the win points, all of the individual
contacts, and all of the desired outcomes at the exact interaction points,
including the systems, people, actions, resources, and tasks required to win
and achieve success at each stage of the consumer buying cycle. Customer
flow—movement across the consumer lifecycle—depicts the degree of cus-
tomer worthiness from contact to contact.
Customer flow is a barometer for success
Customers vote with their wallets and their feet. Plain and simple, this is
the reality underpinning the CxC Matrix: closely manage success in each

12 customer worthy
customer contact, and reap the benefits of more business per customer,
achieve higher margins, and grow more customers. The Matrix captures
customer flow at its most detailed levels, customer-by-customer and con-
tact-by-contact.
Companies that cannot monitor customer worthiness or see contact
flow data are continually surprised by revenue shortfalls, inventory outages,
resource cost overruns, and diminished customer satisfaction. Traditional
financial measures lag too far behind customer activities to be effective for
timely business decision-making. Operations and quality metrics are too far
removed from a customer’s interests, intent, and preferences. As a result,
your company’s internal measurements can look fine. Quality and opera-
tions metrics can appear good to great. But customer and contact flow may
expose disengaged and indifferent customers. The result is revenue decline
and business erosion.
The CxC Matrix is designed to help your company quickly find and exploit
untapped customer value opportunities while working with existing tools
for measurement, decision-making, and planning. The CxC Matrix offers you
the ability to integrally weave “customers” into your strategies, planning,
and goal-setting.
Despite the use of a variety of business analytics and software, few com-
panies can create a complete view of all customer interactions or manage
the customer experience across functions through the customer life cycle.
The Matrix is the first approach that relates actual business results with a
consistent, end-to-end view of the customer experience. It allows you to
measure how changing any aspect of a CxC Matrix contact affects business
processes throughout your company.
The CxC Matrix is built from the customer’s perspective. While businesses
use many forms of buying models and customer life cycle models, the Matrix
pays special attention to matching a company’s people, systems, informa-
tion technology infrastructure, and performance metrics to each stage of
the consumer cycle and corresponding set of contacts.

Each contact is a battleground
Customer contacts are the new battleground for companies looking to
secure more business and fend off competition.
Figure 2.1 Customer Contacts
Figure 2.1 represents a small sample of obvious customer contacts. Notice
that each contact is divided into sections (slots) representing message blocks
that can be customized and personalized. Modern technology, digitized
content, Internet-connected media, and advanced analytic methods can be
used to determine what message fills each slot in each contact. These can
be based on the customer, the time and location of the contact, inventory
levels, news announcements, the customer’s messaging device, or the goals
and objectives of your company.
There are virtually limitless combinations of messages that can be deliv-
ered individually to each customer through each slot in each contact. Your

14 customer worthy
company has no choice but to pay for each contact, so each slot in each
contact should be treated as an asset. Customers also invest their time and
money in each contact, ultimately, buying or not buying from you.
Slot is the container that presents a message to a customer during a contact.
Slots exist within systems: they are variable text messages on a utility bill,
shelf locations within a retail store, ad locations within a Web page, and per-
sonalized paragraphs within a telemarketing script. A system may present
multiple slots during a given contact. Each slot can be given an estimated
value, which is the expected return from presenting the best available mes-
sage during a given interaction. In other words, the monetization of con-
tacts—the core concept of CxC Matrix—is implemented through the
monetization of slots.
Technology and business practices have evolved to enable your business
to compete at this nano level. Every sub-message or “slot” in every contact
represents the new competitive frontier—from the greeting on a voice mail,
to each of 20 individual slots or sections in a single web page, to the labels on
the outside of a package and the text message that appears on a customer’s
Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) as he enters your location.
Visualizing, analyzing, monetizing, and optimizing each slot in each con-
tact is the foundation of the CxC Matrix. It assesses the effectiveness of each
slot and each contact and provides companies and customers a platform to
continuously innovate and improve the customer experience.
Single channel excellence: Amazon
Amazon, an ecommerce pioneer, expertly uses every square inch of a custom-
er’s screen to deliver a mosaic of offers and messages designed to stimulate
interest, win more customer time, and generate additional revenue.
Look at the Amazon web page (Figure 2.2) and notice how Amazon uses

64 slots on the first page of its 14-1 ⁄2 pages about the featured book, The
Essential Drucker.
It is obvious to advanced marketing practitioners and ecommerce profes-
sionals that Amazon has monetized each slot similarly to the way Google
and DoubleClick monetize, barter, select, and continuously test, monitor,
and report on the success of electronic ad placements. Amazon has spent
millions on designing this page for this moment and for this customer,
leveraging the knowledge it has collected from every similar search and
web navigation route.
Figure 2.2 Amazon Slot Chart
Web page slots: 263+
Each message is precisely determined, scripted, presented, arranged,
ordered, and prioritized based on its probability to drive more revenue and
harvest customer value.
When the customer clicks through to order the book, another stream
of messages and offers appear in carefully arranged slots designed to
secure the sale, up-sell services with format and packaging options, cross-

16 customer worthy
sell additional items, and invite participation through referrals and reviews.
When the book arrives, it is accompanied by a cost-justified set of fliers and
promotions. Nothing is left to chance. No slot is wasted.
So, how does Amazon’s 263+ advertising messages per web page make
the customer feel? Was the customer also bombarded by additional mes-
sages while online. Was music playing? Was the TV on? Was the customer
in a web café at the time? Was the customer simultaneously conducting
business with your company?
This is just a small sample of the new marketing reality in which cus-
tomers are exposed to tens of thousands of messages every week. They are
approached through 20 to 100 entertainment and news channels, smart
appliances, radio, billboards, signage, newspapers, magazines, product
placements in shows and movies, Bluetooth-connected everything, RFID,
and on and on. Channels are exploding, and customers are stuck in the
middle of a mash-up of messages, promises, and offers.
You are not Amazon, and Amazon does not have
all the answers
While Amazon’s web page is a good example of monetizing every slot to
achieve the best outcome per customer, Amazon chooses to compete only in
online shopping. There is no phone number to call for shopping assistance
or to order the Drucker book by phone. Go to the order page, and you will
still find no phone number or online chat information. Amazon is smart
enough to know that any phone or chat contact detracts from customer
profit. Add a $10,000 television and stereo to your shopping cart, and you
still have no phone numbers.
If you take the time to gather information about Amazon business
programs, such as “Selling on Amazon,” “Developer Services,” or “Build an
eCommerce Website,” you will find no phone numbers. As elsewhere on
the Internet, finding a phone number is a frustrating scavenger hunt, but
Amazon knows that. It understands the value and costs associated with
each contact.

Amazon’s lesson
The Amazon example is a best practice for online shopping, but it is an
inferior example for luxury shopping, in-person shopping, or direct TV and
online shopping through QVC and home shopping networks. So experiment
and test innovations, but be true to your core value proposition and manage
your costs. Focus is key.
Similarly, business services solutions provided by Amazon online appear
to be mostly self-service, even though most businesses pay a premium for
hand-holding, expert advice, and face-to-face consultations.
The Amazon web page is used as an example because it is a graphic
composite of offers strategically designed to continuously learn about the
customer and grow revenue. The Amazon site clearly exemplifies how the
stages of the consumer cycle, interests, and attributes are used to dynami-
cally script each customer’s experience.
This portion of Amazon’s strategy and supporting technologies like
Amazon’s databases, algorithms, content management systems, and deci-
sion engines are the foundations for the next generation of marketing and
managing customer contacts.
You, too, can Think Like a Customer
There are lots of strategies that Amazon uses that won’t work for your
company, but the CxC Matrix will help you identify simple improvements
that reduce costs in weeks, not months, using a simple metric: yield per
customer.
You’ll quickly uncover untapped revenue and margin growth opportuni-
ties by tracing customer activities and exposing underused customer con-
tacts.
The Matrix exposes underused contacts not only to internal departments
and managers but also to selected third parties and partners. Allowing third
parties to participate in company contacts by activities such as selling
advertising space on a website, re-marketing alternative offers to internally

18 customer worthy
low-potential customers, or including paid inserts in shipping cartons may
generate incremental income at little or no cost.
From contact cacophony to clarity
Building a complete picture of every customer contact across your company
and across every channel is not easy, and it won’t be done overnight, but it
is vital to aligning company resources to achieve optimum customer yield.
Whereas some companies want to reduce the number of their customer
contacts and channels as costs per contact escalate, others want to grow
the frequency and breadth of customer contacts in order to extract more
value per customer, promote more products, get closer to customers, and
generate referrals and affiliate revenue.
Easy to get started
Every customer contact has a cost, whether it is an email offer, an in-store
salesperson, an information phone call, or a receipt handed to a customer.
The CxC Matrix starts as a simple tool for companies to inventory and cat-
egorize every possible customer contact from the time a customer first
becomes aware of a company or its products and services, through the
buying decision, support services, and the time that the customer disposes
of the product. Then, each contact is assigned an owner responsible for
operation, technology, and execution. Each contact point or Matrix cell is
measured for the number of customers who pass through it. Contacts are
monetized to expose their cost and potential revenue and analyzed further
to uncover revenue enhancement and cost savings contact-by-contact.
Corporate objectives executed per contact
A core CxC Matrix concept is that each customer contact can be managed
according to your company’s business objectives. The Matrix assumes that
each contact can be handled more intelligently and that your company,
customers, and a network of service and goods providers will participate in
each customer contact.

The Matrix establishes “customer” as a corporate performance metric
that spans and connects all departments, disciplines, systems, and pro-
cesses.
Analyze the potential personalized treatments
The wealth of company and business knowledge, combined with knowledge
of your customers, allows you to script the perfect customer interaction with
a beginning, middle, and end, while assessing the customer’s needs, values,
and preferences. This accomplishes your company’s current priorities and
objectives. A high-tech example from Amazon was presented above. It’s a
sophisticated web page that presents and arranges multiple messages that
can be configured and personalized for each customer. These messages are
synthesized and synchronized through combinations of behavioral informa-
tion, business rules, and service provider capabilities.
Continuous learning through data capture and behavior monitoring
The CxC Matrix provides an orderly method for capturing information from
every contact and allows that information to be linked to performance by
contact, channel, and department. The Matrix shows the comprehensive
picture of how many customers are in each stage and channel and forecasts
how many customers will move to which channels in which timeframes. The
customers who don’t move in the expected period of time are then avail-
able for closer inspection and analysis. For example, if you know that 100
people came into a store in an hour, 50 of them asked a sales associate a
question, but only 2 actually made a purchase, you know you need to drill
down to find out more about the customer experience of the 50 people who
just wandered into the store and wandered out again, as well as the 48 who
talked with a sales associate but didn’t make a purchase.
The Matrix helps your company shorten its reaction time to market
shifts and abrupt changes in customer preferences and behaviors, providing
service flexibility and market nimbleness for an unprecedented competitive
advantage.

20 customer worthy
The Matrix shepherds customers through the consumer cycle
Using the Matrix you can ensure that customers do not fall through the
cracks in internal processes due to incomplete, fragmented, and disparate
systems and missed intradepartmental hand-offs. The CxC Matrix provides
a conceptual map of how customers meet their own needs by searching,
finding, buying, and using products and services.
Because the CxC Matrix tracks all customer contacts and all customer
experience threads, you can anticipate where your customers’ next series
of contacts are likely to occur, the channels they are likely to use, and even
estimate the likely timing of the subsequent contacts.
“Nearly 60% of customers want you to let them begin an order in one chan-
nel (say, your website) and finish it in another (say, your downtown store.) By
2012, these types of cross-channel transactions could account for 38% of all
retail sales.”
—“Strategies for Satisfying the Spoiled Consumer with Cross-Channel
Execution,”June 2008 webinar promotion, Multichannel Merchant
Think Like a Customer
Even in its simplest form, the CxC Matrix provides a platform for interde-
partmental dialogue and solution-building. Managers and employees “get
it.” They can see that there is a marketing role in every customer contact.
Discussing business challenges and opportunities using the customer as
a vehicle makes obvious sense: it improves operations and quality for the
customer, and measures performance by customer. Employees from all levels
are empowered to participate as they speak on the customer’s behalf, and
they can easily chart a customer’s current and potential paths through the
company.
The mantra “Think Like a Customer!” opens conversations to innovative
solutions, exposes artifacts of corporate folklore and management blind

spots, all centered around and measured by customer flow and contact
performance.
The CxC Matrix is common sense to business improvement
Like everyone else, I have been the customer of countless companies that
have left money on the table; that failed to fully use my time and invest-
ment in learning their processes and operations; that failed to simply ask for
more business, or failed to make me aware of how I could better use their
services. This is what the Matrix exposes—the opportunity in each instance,
interaction, and contact. The Matrix seeks to generate additional revenue
streams from every single contact, customer-by-customer.
The Matrix leverages existing resources
Most companies already possess all of the ingredients required to achieve
tremendous success. All that is required is some level of process redesign,
repurposing current capabilities and resources, modifying current operating
practices, and expanding often-unused functionality in current systems.
A large amount of value is uncovered when your managers simply visu-
alize their business in the Matrix. Visualization reveals what management
and employees intrinsically know:
Customers get lost within the company’s silos.
Missed departmental, process, and systems hand-offs forfeit
opportunities and increase costs.
Analyzing business from the customer’s perspective unveils
opportunities and risks.
The Matrix clearly depicts what you already know—that your company
could perform better if only you:
Knew about all of the customer’s activities.
Were able to leverage all of the options at each consumer cycle
when you answer the phone or greet a customer in person.
•
•
•
•
•

22 customer worthy
Were able to leverage all of the options when the customer logs
in to a web page or sits alone at a desk and opens a package.
These contacts are rich with untapped, unmeasured opportunities,
and the Matrix encourages and enables companies to tap into under-
performing assets.
Why now? Managing at the contact level is a capability made possible
through technical advances that standardize data access through open
systems. These systems engage customers via the Internet and through
Internet-connected devices, services, and communities. However, because
many companies operate in silos, and marketing managers are not familiar
with the capabilities of the new technology and may not speak the same
language as the information technology department, much of the capability
of the systems goes unused.
Think about it. Traditionally billing statements were static pieces of paper
that listed items and cost. But with digitization and customer database
connectivity, you can leverage the customer’s invoice to present new prod-
uct offers, stuff the billing statement envelope with targeted messages,
and promote a new service on the outside of the envelope in one, albeit
complex, contact.
Electronic billing statements afford even greater flexibility and person-
alization. They can be accessed and delivered across any electronic network
and formatted to each customer’s specifications. They can include Internet
web page links to product, service, warranty, maintenance, and corporate
information. They can spawn alerts and other activities.
The customer billing statement, historically viewed as an operations and
finance department basic requirement and cost of doing business, can now
also be viewed as a marketing tool and valued by the amount of potential
incremental revenue it generates. It can notify customers, generate referrals
and revenue from third parties that pay for this specific customer’s atten-
tion in this contact.
Every contact is rich with revenue potential and cost savings when
exposed through the Matrix. Hundreds of similar opportunities exist
•

throughout your customer contact network. This is the domain and the
function of the CxC Matrix.
The alternative to contact chaos
The purpose of the Matrix is to remove the chaos and enable the transpar-
ency of every customer contact so that marketers can be in control and
leverage every internal and external resource.
Per-contact costs such as telephone support minutes, envelopes, and
emails seem to be tightly managed to peak efficiency, yet cost per customer
continues to increase due to escalating messages, offers, services, and prod-
uct complexity. This complexity also appears to be the source of customer
dissatisfaction and disengagement.
The burden of creating, responding to, managing, and monitoring cus-
tomer messages overwhelms companies. Costs continue to escalate while
communications quality, management oversight, governance, and controls
affect fewer than one-third of contacts. In-bound voice messages, emails,
letters, ever-expanding web mentions, customer reviews, chat sessions, You-
Tube videos, customer-generated media, partner communications, and all
of the person-to-person service calls and sales pitches continue to grow out
of control, raising costs and business risk exposure across multiple depart-
ments and multiple fronts.
Today, public relations is at a tremendous disadvantage when injured,
disgruntled, and scorned customers can cheaply and easily post a message
on an electronic bulletin board, blog, or chat room, send an email to a news
service, or post a video on YouTube. How does a company respond? Protect-
ing your brands and your company against risk is another area managed
through the Matrix. In bygone times, headquarters’ executives sometimes
did not know about a customer issue or crisis until they read about it in
the newspaper.
The CxC Matrix brings order to the chaos of the out-of-control customer
contact system and provides a means to manage, observe, measure, and
monitor customer contacts.

24 customer worthy
Five essential Matrix deliverables
The Matrix provides ease of use with these five steps:
Visualize: The Matrix emphasizes visualization to provide the broadest
understanding of customers across departments and functions and
among partner companies.
Analyze: The Matrix provides a rich data set for companies to analyze per-
formance by contact, by customer, and in conjunction with existing
metrics.
Monetize: Every business decision and every scenario—complete with vis-
ibility of its downstream and upstream impact—is monetized in the
Matrix.
Prioritize: Focus time, resources, and effort on the contact areas that show
the greatest potential return. Automate what works, and invest your
resources in innovation.
Optimize: The Matrix provides a means to quantify, replicate, and automate
best practices, leveraging its analytical and monetization foundation
to fuel continuous improvement.
Isn’t this just sales and marketing?
If marketing is responsible for generating more revenue from every cus-
tomer, answering every phone, designing every product, selecting every
office location, and shaking every customer’s hand, then yes—the Matrix
is just marketing.
While the CxC Matrix focuses on customers and contacts, the tradi-
tional domain and function of marketing, most of the contacts (especially
underused contacts) are not advertisements and sales contacts. They are
contacts across the entire consumer cycle and all its stages and throughout
every channel.
Let’s find out more about the Matrix and how to implement it in your
company.

25
Chapter 3
Think Like a Customer!
The Customer’s Version of the Story
Understanding business contact-by-contact,
customer-by-customer
Figure 3.1
Remember, the customer process is the most important process in every
business. The most important!
Need, Shop, Buy
When you think like a customer, you get a simple picture of your business.
Or more accurately, you get a simple picture of how customers describe your
business in their context and from memory. Describing a business from the
customer’s perspective exposes where and how customers navigate their
purchase decisions, their decision paths, and the options they select and
deselect in each contact.
We will use these three simple customer process steps in buying a lawn
mower to illustrate how the CxC Matrix works: Need, Shop, Buy. Replace
“lawn mower” with “main frame computer” or “insurance” if you want to
simulate a business-to-business transaction. The design accommodates
nearly any product or service.

26 customer worthy
In the Customer’s words:
I received an email from my local hardware store that had a picture of
a lawn mower similar to the one I had bought three years ago.
I clicked on the picture and saw a good price, with a trade-in for
my current lawn mower. So, I drove over to the hardware store and
bought the new mower.
They delivered it and picked up the old one the same day.
Figure 3.2
The simple need, shop, buy scenario gets a little more complicated when
we expose the actual contacts that took place between the customer and
the business and resulted in the customer’s purchase.
Note that the customer recounts each contact in sequence and notes
the channel (email, website, store, or home). Presented this simply, it is rea-
sonable to assume that anyone at your company or even your competitors
could understand the steps in the customer’s process.
However, as with many illustrative business scenarios, the simple process
does not adequately convey the amount of design, planning, and coor-
dinated execution required across the company to make the customer’s
purchase seem “uneventful.”
Unfortunately, processes like these are often created through trial and
error. As a result, your company and customers may suffer through a number
of mismanaged contacts, broken processes, and missed hand-offs before you
fine-tune the process and deliver the best outcome.
To highlight the simple elegance of the lawn mower story, look at the
diagram below for a sample of the potential problems that could have hap-
pened at each contact:

3: Think Like a Customer! 27
Figure 3.3
The potential negative outcomes highlighted in Figure 3.3 include a
couple of points worth mentioning:
The email, website, and store contacts bear a cost, whether suc-
cessful or not.
Contact costs are not funded until the mower purchase.
Each contact’s success is dependent on the success of the
upstream and downstream contacts.
To succeed, each contact requires synchronization across market-
ing, operations, sales, fulfillment, website, store, finance, reverse
logistics, legal, and partners.
Failure at any of the contacts, malfunction, or defect in execution
raises costs and endangers the revenue objective of the business.
Each contact contains substantial data that, when put in the
customer’s context, delineates the success of the business.
Trial and error is expensive for both your company and customers, wast-
ing internal resources and your customers’ time while foregoing eventual
revenue. The Matrix provides a means for you to plot each of these contacts
and to observe the potential gaps in communications, connectivity, and
operational processes. It allows you to minimize errors while ensuring a
positive customer outcome.
•
•
•
•
•
•

28 customer worthy
The Matrix also captures the success rate of all customers going through
each contact or process stage. The number of customers who survive from
“need” to “shop” to “buy” is the measurement of success at each contact.
By exposing each contact, the elements of each contact, and the resources
accountable for each contact, you can assess performance and modify the
process to improve the outcome.
The Matrix captures and codifies the company’s most successful contact
paths, enabling replication and continuous improvement for future promo-
tions. Collectively, the repository of best practices, promotions, market-
ing, sales, operations, and customer-service contact processes becomes the
company’s unique knowledge base for success.
Now . . . for the rest of the story
While the customer relayed his journey, which led to happily mowing his
lawn, he did not acknowledge, remember, or recognize the other contacts the
business used to ultimately secure his mower purchase. He was bombarded
with messages attempting to get his attention, to prompt and prod him
into “needing” a new mower. Some of the additional contacts are outlined
in Figure 3.4.
Figure 3.4
Once the customer engaged in the initial contact, each subsequent
contact was carefully choreographed with a single objective: to create the
urgency to replace his three-year-old mower.

Part of the well-executed design entailed educating the customer on
“how to buy a mower” and specifically, “how easy it is to buy from Acme.”
Additionally, each contact carefully persuaded him that “Acme Local Hard-
ware is your best choice for garden equipment.” Every contact and sub-mes-
sage in every contact was aimed at these two objectives.
Choreographing each step in a consumer cycle
The seemingly simple customer “need” was the result of multiple efforts
coordinated across marketing, advertising, product sponsors and co-op
advertising partners. Each group’s efforts focused on getting the customer’s
attention, building his awareness of his need for a lawn mower, and con-
vincing him that now was the best time to act. All of the messages were
coordinated to reinforce the value of a new mower and to create urgency
to “act now!”
The “shop” step fulfilled the customer’s need for more information to
make his purchase. Each contact was designed to reinforce the superior
benefits the customer would achieve by upgrading his mowing experience,
providing details and specifications that were carefully presented and pack-
aged to meet his specific needs and preferences.
The customer’s needs and interests were distilled from:
His previous mower purchase,
Subsequent store purchases,
Web page downloads,
Local market information,
Purchased third party lifestyle and interests data, including:
The types of lawn products the customer purchased,
The price point at which the customer purchased,
The total amount of outdoor home expenditures the customer
made over the past three years,
Other information not directly related to home and hardware
purchases.
•
•
•
•
•
-
-
-
-

30 customer worthy
All of this information was used to build a company memory that mirrors
what a top sales and customer relationship manager would remember and
use to persuade a customer to “buy.” The company invested in technology,
data, and training with the Chief Executive Officer’s mandate to become each
targeted customer’s “single, most trusted, most knowledgeable source.”
Same customer outcome, low tech delivery
Would the customer know the difference between this highly technical,
tightly orchestrated, overly complex sales, marketing, and operations process
versus receiving a chance email from the salesperson who sold him his old
mower three years ago?
No, and it makes no difference. Either way, the customer buys the
mower.
What the CxC Matrix provides your business, regardless of its size and
infrastructure, is a means to delineate the best way to manage individual
contacts by matching your business objectives with the customer’s values
and preferences.
The company’s side of the story—orchestrating the contacts
Dissecting the mower contacts
Each customer contact contains multiple messages. Figure 3.5 exposes the 47
message slots used in the simplified need, shop, buy story. Each slot can hold
a message, an offer, instructions, contact information, third party advertise-
ments, images, operational information, news, or government warnings. It is
constrained only by limitations in the medium, data, technology, or ability to
personalize. Without limitations, messages can vary by individual, location,
time of day, product inventory, and so forth. Just about any attribute can be
used to prescribe the message, wording, images, colors, or order language
for each individual slot.

Figure 3.5
Here’s how we count the slots:
Email: 8 slots—banner, offer, closing, contact information, return-
address message, right border, header, footer;
Web page: 24 slots—3 pages, 8 slots per page;
Store visit: signs—4 slots; point of purchase—3 slots (display
literature and rack); sales person—3 slots (greeting, information
extend, close); point of sale—3 slots; receipt—2 slots (back and
front); warranty card—1 slot.
There are numerous additional slots at the store and throughout this
customer’s process.
Digital printing, digital technologies, and Internet-connected devices
such as kiosks, websites, and point-of-purchase displays are equipped to
deliver multi-part messages and groups of messages as directed by a set of
rules based on customer type, location, customer segment, time of day, or
any other set of rules.
•
•
•

32 customer worthy
Each contact is a container for slots
Definition: A container is the specific contact point within a channel.
Containers distinguish the individual contacts within a contact. The
nature and attributes of a container depend on the channel or medium.
A container can be the greeting in an in-person sales call, a brochure,
an FAQ on a web page. Containers have specific dimensions. Retail
stores are containers with actual physical walls, shelves, brick, and
mortar. Dealer or distributor containers may refer to separate busi-
nesses. Containers in an advertising channel may be different issues of
a magazine or time slots purchased on different television stations. A
web container may be a web page, while a call center container would
be an individual telemarketing script.
Each of the three channels represented in Figure 3.5—email, website, and
store—has individual messaging capabilities. The channel’s medium provides
a set of capabilities and constraints, as does the individual contact point. For
example, the signs in the store are not likely to vary to present a different
message for each customer, whereas email does provide individualized mes-
saging. Similarly, specifications for a web page will be quite different from
store receipt container specifications. The web page contains 7 more slots
for messages. It also accommodates images and provides much more space
per slot for messages. The receipt is restricted to one message on each side
printed in black and white and the message cannot exceed 144 characters.
Key takeaway: Inventorying each medium’s specifications and slots
enables companies to manage slots across the company from a single
system.
Too much to measure
With so many messages, tracking which slot and message combination
“works” becomes nearly impossible. However, assembling all of the contacts
and their components in the sequence, environment, and context that the

customer experiences is essential to understanding each element’s perfor-
mance, as well as identifying and codifying success. With this understanding
we are not only able to better measure performance but we are also able
to predict the outcome and likely success of similar initiatives delivered to
similar customers.
For example, the mower story’s success comes not just from the custom-
er’s click on the picture of the mower in the email. It also comes from the
email’s subject line, the offers and messages contained in the email, and
all of the messages that preceded and succeeded each contact. The Matrix
uniquely measures not only what “works” but also measures the absence of
activity related to other messages and contacts. The mower offer may have
successfully worked in this sequence because it was positioned next to a
more expensive alternative or in a sequence of other customer activities.
The CxC Matrix is designed to conceptually represent the multitude of
variations across the customer’s contact path while capturing the periph-
eral messages and contact elements, giving you the most comprehensive
view of all customer contact experiences, successful and unsuccessful. The
Matrix enables scenario building and experimentation providing a platform
for customer-partnered innovation.
All of these elements can be individually measured, as well as in combi-
nation with others using the CxC Matrix, to assess the investment of each
department and the company’s total investment per customer, per program,
per channel, per contact, and per message.
The loudest sound in business is customer silence
We can easily see how the Matrix measures contacts and contact sequence,
but the Matrix is equally powerful when used to measure what did not
happen. Most business measurement systems count transactions, custom-
ers, inventory, but the CxC Matrix uniquely highlights the events that were
expected in the customer sequence, but did not happen. For example, the
group of customers that research a product, conduct all of the pre-buying
evaluation then do not buy. The customers that buy and pay for a product

34 customer worthy
but do not register, install or use the product. The Matrix highlights changes
in customer behavior and alerts managers to investigate further while also
providing a rich data set to examine customer contact data. The Matrix
uniquely measures when the voice of the customer goes silent.
Summary
Each contact and each message within each contact bears a cost as well as
corresponding direct and potential revenues.
Each slot in each contact in each channel has its own value while a
series of contacts and a series of slots presented to a customer reflect your
company’s total investment and return per customer.
The mix of contacts that engage a customer is the most underused
asset at most companies. Extracting the optimum value contact-by-contact
has always been feasible for very small companies communicating through
limited channels to a small number of customers. However, using the Matrix
and leveraging advances in technology, analytics, and process design, all
companies can compete contact-by-contact.

35
CHAPTER 4
Capturing the Customer Experience
The value of a business is the value of its customer contacts. The CxC Matrix
enables your company, customers, and all stakeholders to visualize, mon-
etize, analyze, and optimize customers contact-by-contact.
The Matrix’s primary purpose is to help you align your corporate objec-
tives with the customer’s values and preferences at each contact. This
approach leverages current technological capabilities, while also serving as a
framework for upcoming and future customer and business technologies.
The CxC Matrix provides a detailed framework to classify and man-
age customer contacts. It places every potential customer contact with a
company—the company’s brand, products, and services—into the intersec-
tion of the consumer cycle and company’s channels. Channels are the physi-
cal, digital, and virtual locations where customer contacts occur.
CxC Matrix Customer Stages
Matrix stages represent the customer’s journey to satisfy a need or want for
a product or service in the course of the relationship or transaction. They
are the horizontal dimension of a CxC Matrix.
The following are the stages in the customer’s journey.

36 customer worthy
Figure 4.1
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.Community
Need Shop Buy Use
Need
1. Customer becomes aware of a need.
2. Customer begins preliminary research of how to satisfy need.
3. Customer begins to qualify solutions, vendors, approaches as either
“in” or “out.”
Shop
4. Customer examines offers from providers considering specific product
and service attributes (ingredients, warranty, availability, total cost of
operation).
5. Customer prepares for purchase, weighing perceived value and
benefits of selection against his own value set, options, and alterna-
tives such as delay, buy used, no purchase, upgrade, and optional
add-ons.
6. Customer and company contract to provide service and/or product,
agree on price, payment, delivery, warranty, etc.
Buy
7. Customer and company agree on product and service fulfillment terms
—take now, send to location, immediate delivery, multi-point delivery,
multi-user subscription, and conditional incremental delivery.
8. Customer receives product or initiates service.

4: Capturing the Customer Experience 37
9. Customer accepts product as delivered, unwraps and assembles, and
initiates service.
10. Customer pays, including the entire payment and financing process:
down payments, partial payments, incremental and subscription-
based payments, and all exchanges of funds and fund equivalents.
Use
11. Ongoing and one-time customer use, including passive use of a prod-
uct or service that a customer may not knowingly consume, such as
life insurance, product and service warranties, and product posses-
sion, and storage.
12. From box opening and assembly instructions through operation and
maintenance guidelines, “How to contact us” messages, and all con-
tacts related to assistance in using and maintaining products and
services.
13. Contact resulting from malfunctioning or perceived malfunctioning
of product or service, from unexpected or unplanned use, or from
another situation involving the product.
14. Contacts related to the product and service’s end life, requiring physi-
cal disposal, service secession acknowledgment, expiration notice
and related activities, re-selling and recycling, and replenishment,
including selling and re-selling the product. Also includes product
and service purchase and use artifacts, such as bills, receipts, usage
summary logs, archived information, product, and service liability
contacts.
15. Interactions related to customer word-of-mouth, social networking,
review and recommendation platforms, community market sites
such as Craigslist, Facebook, LinkedIn, Amazon, Froogle, eBay, etc.,
membership clubs and groups, trade and after-market organizations,
collectors’ clubs, regulatory bodies, trade publications, websites, web
forums, blogs, social networking, and product reviews.

38 customer worthy
The CxC Matrix stages address the process design issues that you must
deal with in assembling a cohesive, high-quality, end-to-end customer expe-
rience. It also recognizes that each stage may be handled by different depart-
ments or even different companies.
CxC Matrix channel categories
This level CxC Matrix classifies channels into six categories, grouping them
from the customer’s perspective and representing the customer’s expecta-
tions for service, intimacy, and urgency, including Geography, Digital, Loca-
tion, Third Party, One-on-One, and Community, shown in Figure 4.2.
Figure 4.2 CxC Matrix
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.CommunityGeography X X X
Digital X X X X X X X
Location X X X X X X X X X X
Third party X X X X X
One-on-one X X X X X X X
Community X X X X
Plotting “The Mower Story” for the single customer told from the com-
pany’s perspective depicts the total contacts made across all channels and
the resulting revenue achieved at Stage 6: Contract. Each cell in the sum-
marized Matrix above represents a contact or set of contacts grouped by
the type of channel.

Contacts are recorded in CRM systems, web log files, marketing systems,
financial transaction systems, call center and telemarketing systems, contact
management, sales management, advertising tracking systems, customer
registration systems, loyalty club, membership and affiliate systems and any
number of internal and third party formal and informal, paper and electronic
data capture systems.
The importance of visualization
Before you can affect customer performance, your company must collectively
understand its customers’ experiences. The Matrix provides a mental model
of customer situations for the purposes of making rapid and appropriate
decisions at each contact, as shown in Figure 4.3.
Figure 4.3 CxC Matrix: Customer Mapping

40 customer worthy
The picture is important: More than half the brain is devoted to processing
visuals. As much as 80 percent of our learning is visually oriented.
Customer Mapping—follow the customer
The customer flow diagram (Figure 4.3) is an excellent tool for examin-
ing cause-and-effect relationships across various customer experience
scenarios. These diagrams reveal patterns and changes in patterns that may
expose competitive threats, market changes, or product and service issues,
among other things. The diagram can also be used to strategize and design
responses to various strategic scenarios: ending a product line; alternative
distribution channel; launching a new channel; charging for previously free
services; partnership and outsourcing options.
These visualizations, or customer experience maps, help all departments
and experts gain better customer understanding. They often uncover why
certain customer policies, communication programs, pricing programs, and
delivery programs do not work or are poorly received by customers. Take a
simple logistics problem such as when a customer submits a large multi-
product order and requires pieces to be delivered to multiple locations. The
Matrix can be used to map the best customer outcome at each location
and in each contact based on corporate objectives and individual endpoint
potential. This scenario seems simple to the parties intimately involved in
the customer’s operations on a day-to-day basis, but it may be conceptually
incomprehensible to a new person in the finance department or in shipping
who has to contact “the customer” about a delay in shipping on one item.
Who do you call?
To simplify, individual channels can be grouped into the following
types:

Geography
TV
Community events
Radio
Billboards
Outdoor
Signage
Magazines
Digital
Banner ads
Website
Company email
Blast email
Webinars
On-line demonstrations
Hosted sponsored online content, video, etc.
Campaign management email
Support email
Click for chat
Location
Store
In-store promotions
Demonstrations
Third Party
Package inserts
Private-label partners
Affiliate offers
Advertorials
Resellers
Paid analysts
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

42 customer worthy
Paid reviewers
Aggregators
Brokers
Distributors
Non-captive sales agents
Paid subject matter experts
One-on-One
Inbound telemarketing
Online customer support
Text Messaging, SMS
Email
Hosted, sponsored contests
Email billing statements
Shipments
Catalog
Customer service
Statement inserts
Service click for chat
Direct mail
Outbound telemarketing in person sales call
Community
Independent membership organizations
Clubs
Social networks
Subject matter experts
Reviewers
Independent trade organizations
Blogosphere
Trade shows
Public relations
Press/trade magazines
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.CareSupport
13.Repair
14.Dispose
15.Community
Geography TV
Events
Radio
Outdoor
Signage
Magazines
Digital Banner ads
Website
Company email
Campaign man-
agement email
Support email
Sales click
for chat
Location In-store
promotions
Kiosks
Third party Package inserts
Private-label
partners
Affiliate offers
One-on-one Inbound
telemartketing
Online customer
support
Billing
statements
Shipments
Door-to-door
Catalog
Customer service
Statement
inserts
Service click
for chat
Direct mail
Outbound
telemartketing
Community Press/trade
magazines
Blogs

44 customer worthy
You should list every channel and medium to create a comprehensive
list of all customer contacts, not just the channels you currently use but all
channels available to the consumer, your partners, and communities. Further
detail can be added to deepen insights and choreograph the messages and
treatments in each experience stage.
Marketing, communication, and customer-service managers find this
level of detail useful for planning campaigns, alerting departments about
the impact of upcoming programs, and preparing downstream channels for
increases or decreases in customer flow.
A chart like Figure 4.4 can also be used to show the cost and benefit
of each contact and each cell’s success rate in moving customers to the
contract stage.
Customer Flow Through the CxC Matrix
Visualizing the “mower” customer’s life stages and customer-experience his-
tory helps every person involved in brainstorming, designing, executing, and
measuring the “buy a mower” program. Stakeholders can quickly assess their
role in the program, as well as the customer’s progress and the program’s
and your company’s objectives.
Broadening our view of the customer’s experience to not just the pur-
chase but his use of the product, repairs, and eventual disposal, we expose
more marketing opportunities and the ability to realize greater revenue from
this customer over the customer’s entire lifetime.
The customer’s perspective includes two lawn mowers—the one he pur-
chased three years ago and the new mower that the customer “wanted” now
through marketing persuasion. The contacts look like this:
Figure 4.5

Key takeaway: The customer process is the same, but the difference
over time is the customer’s perspective, the company’s message,
execution capabilities, and offers.
In this hypothetical example, you can replace “mower” with a computer,
car, consulting service, cell phone, or any other product or service. The cus-
tomer process is standardized here for analysis and planning purposes.
Customers dictate the pace at which they move through their buying
stages. Customers also dictate the agreement terms and conditions required
to continue to conduct business. The cycle stops and the customer does not
continue to the subsequent stage, or completely ceases all contacts when
he decides your company’s proposition or his experience with your company
is no longer customer worthy.
You can attempt to accelerate “need” by growing the perceived value
of buying, switching, upgrading, and converting, but the ultimate suc-
cess comes down to successfully aligning corporate objectives (sell more
product X at Y margin over the next 30 days) to the customer’s need (cus-
tomer needs product X). This is easily tested by asking the simple question,
“Is our proposition customer worthy?” Ultimately, the customer decides.
Visualization clears up what may appear to be data anomalies or errors
when business and marketing analysts examine program performance,
financial implications, and operational design. Using the hypothetical sce-
nario as an example, it is simple and logical to treat the “Mower 2” contacts
and customer life cycle as sequential events as presented in the simple
Matrix view. Here is a visual depiction of this mistake:
Figure 4.6
In reality, the customer life stages often overlap (and occur in varying
sequences) when buying a new product or service. For a period of time, the
customer has two similar products, two service providers, or two instances
of a software solution that they are maintaining.

46 customer worthy
The customer’s actual sequence looked more like this:
Figure 4.7
Lawn Mower 1 and Mower 2 coexisted for a while, and the time overlap
may have caused issues for the company, including incompatible function-
ality, confusion in support areas, registration, support, and warranty and
exchange mistakes. The Matrix can also depict the downstream impact of
the customer’s decision to keep the old mower and return the new mower.
This degree of transparency about the customer’s actions can shed light on
operational issues and opportunities, customer service challenges, campaign
results, sales efforts, and fraud.
Advanced CxC Matrix concepts
A customer’s experiences with your company are often more complex than
the simple, one-dimensional presentation we use in this book can express.
The visual representations used throughout this book are used to simply
convey the CxC Matrix's underlying concepts and mathematical formulas
used to measure, manage and predict the outcome of multi-party, multi-
channel, dynamic customer relationships. In practice, customers may have
multiple experiences with a brand and with your company, whether buying
multiple products over time or multiple products and services purchased
to meet a single need.
The simple sequence depicted here does not always appear to happen in
order, stages may be repeated, stalled and restarted, and stages may occur
outside a company’s direct view.
As a result, customers may have multiple simultaneous experiences,
which may or may not impact each other. A contact with a member of a

customer’s family or an employee of a large customer may be mishandled
and threaten apparently unrelated customer potential value. The Matrix
enables managers to isolate illogical flows, events and consequences for
further investigation and repair. Linking together all of a customer’s expe-
riences can show how a bad experience or a poor contact can negatively
impact other seemingly unrelated experiences, like order cancellations or a
customer’s request to receive a single shipment of multiple items.
Figure 4.8 provides a conceptual view of the interrelationship of multiple
customer experiences at a corporate level down to a business, product, and
marketing level. This type of analysis shows how you can extend product
lines or your brand by understanding how customers value and recognize
the brand when making purchasing decisions.
Figure 4.8 Corporate Customer Experience Roll-up
Company/Brand Level
Line of Business Level
Product/Service Level
Campaigns/Offers

48 customer worthy
Figure 4.8 is just one of several drill-down or hierarchical CxC Matrix
views meant to depict how customers can:
Have relationships and contacts with multiple areas in a company,
Be involved in multiple programs,
Be at various stages with different parts of a company or group of
companies responsible for delivering a product or service.
The visual Matrix helps managers better understand the interrelation-
ships and dependencies where performance and operations are linked to cus-
tomers. This view of customer linkage also helps you better assess resource
allocation and better leverage overlapping processes and resources. This
process view unveils opportunities for resource consolidation, new delivery
and support models, and new product and service innovations. Likewise, the
customer-level view reduces double counting customer opportunities across
divisions and product areas.
Figure 4.9 Multi-Customer Contact Roll Up
•
•
•
Acme, Inc.
CEO.1 CFO CIO
CEO.2
CEO.3
CIO vendor awareness through presentation
triggers new company opportunity for un-
related service interest from same company
spawns new experience CIO.2. New sale?
CIO.2

The CxC Matrix (Figure 4.9) depicts the common occurrence of multiple
decision-makers from Acme, Inc. (customer) participating in one purchase
consideration, where each contact, CEO, CFO and CIO has his or her own
contact streams. In this case, the CEO is considering multiple services from
this company represented as CEO.1, CEO.2, CEO.3.
It is very important that you identify all of the decisions-makers, their
roles and collective contacts across the consumer lifecycle and ongoing
throughout the customer’s relationship.
In a business-to-consumer example, this concept may represent a hus-
band, wife, and child looking to replace a family car or choose a college. The
visual also shows how an experience can spawn and link another experi-
ence. For example, at the contract stage, the CIO was also introduced to a
new hardware protection program that spawned an entirely new customer
experience (CIO.2).
It is important to note that the individual experiences can be examined
discreetly and at a rolled-up level in the Master CxC Matrix at the top.

50
CHAPTER 5
How Complicated Can One Click of
a Mouse Be?
Aligning customer processes with company processes
In the previous chapters, we examined one customer’s series of contacts
across channels and media by stages in the consumer cycle. In this chapter,
we walk through a customer experience, digging deeper into the company’s
contact management view, using the Matrix to connect the customer’s
journey to internal operations, systems, and department owners.
Again, we will start with the same lawn mower story from the customer’s
perspective and add detail using the CxC Matrix building blocks. This Matrix
reduces the 15 stages of the consumer cycle to seven in order to make the
example easier to follow.
Figure 5.1
CxC stage
Need Shop Buy Use
Awareness
Information
Selection
Negotiation
Contract
Logistics
Support
Customer
view
receive
email offer
search
research
standard
or deluxe
free for
90 days
terms
conditions
receive
product
product
query
Note: The CxC Matrix, which consists of 15 Customer Stages, is reduced
here to seven to make the example easier to follow.

5: How Complicated Can One Click of the Mouse Be? 51
Consumer cycle and CxC Matrix stages combined
The Customer View
CxC Matrix Stage 1 Awareness
Customer awareness for need “new lawn mower” generated by email.
By opening the email and clicking on the mower offer, the customer
moves from the “Awareness Stage” to the “Information Stage.” Mar-
keting, advertising, and sales successfully persuaded the customer to
gather information about fulfilling his need.
CxC Matrix Stage 2 Information
Customer opens promotional email, selects product, and is connected
to promotion-specific “lawn mower” web page. Customer reads infor-
mation, and clicks on links for more mower research. Additionally,
the customer enters the product name, model number, and the word
“reviews” into a Google search panel and begins reading review pages,
expert comments, and user comments. The customer also contacts
friends and neighbors about their lawn mower experiences.
CxC Matrix Stage 4 Selection
Customer refines mower needs and the features he wants based on
information, value considerations, and his own circumstances in
Matrix Stage 3, Identification (not shown). The customer then selects
his preferred mower type, brand, and a set of potential vendors. He
returns to the Acme Hardware Store website three more times in two
days and visits the manufacturer’s website four more times before
confirming his selection.
CxC Matrix Stage 5 Negotiation
The customer clicks on the “add to cart” button on the website and
fills in his information. He experiments by adding and removing mower
add-on features and goes back and forth between model options. He
looks for “free shipping” as he has seen from other online vendors, and
he factors in assembly cost and time across each of his options. The
customer abandons the “Acme Hardware Store” online shopping cart
and heads to his local Acme Hardware Store with his email printed out

52 customer worthy
and his web order page in hand. He also prints out competing offers
from other vendors.
CxC Matrix Stage 6 Contract
The customer is greeted by a store salesman who takes him to the lawn
mower section. The customer agrees to the price and the special offer
to deliver the mower to his house and exchange his current mower. He
pays by credit card at the register and receives a receipt that explains
the store’s return policy. It also offers extended warranty protection
for purchases over $50.
CxC Matrix Stage 7 Logistics
The customer arranges for the mower to be delivered between 3:00
and 5:00 p.m. and agrees to have his current mower near his driveway
for removal.
CxC Matrix Stage 12 Support
The customer mows his lawn for two weeks and notices a “funny”
sound when the mower is shutting off. He both calls support and goes
online to research his problem.
The CxC Matrix exposes some of the underpinnings of the company’s
success in selling the mower by exposing each contact from the company’s
perspective.
Figure 5.2 Think Like a Customer (TLC) Stage
CxC stage Need Shop Buy Use
Awareness
Information
Selection
Negotiation
Contract
Logistics
Support
Customer
view
receive
email offer
search
research
standard
or deluxe
free for
90 days
terms
conditions
receive
product
product
query
Depart-
ment
• marketing
ecommerce
• marketing
web
• PPC agency
• product
management
• partners
• product
management
• ecommerce
• operations
• distribution
• product
management
• sales
• finance
• sales
• legal
• finance
• operations
• distribution
• shipping
• partner
• customer care
• operations
• training

The Department View
What appears to the customer as simply clicking on an email, selecting a
couple of products, and hitting a “buy” button is a complex series of busi-
ness rules, business arrangements, inter-company hand-offs, and informa-
tion exchanges connecting a minimum of 8 departments and as many as
14 systems.
Figure 5.3 Department Responsibility And Accountability Metrics KPIs
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.Community
Geography
Digital
Location
Third party
One-on-one
Community
• marketing
• advertising
• promotion
• communications
• finance
• product
management
• retail operations
• re-seller
management
• sales
• customer
support
• operations
• sales
• product
management
• distribution
• operations
• sales
• operations
• delivery
• retail
• distribution
• ebiz
• communications
• sales
• third parties

54 customer worthy
This example shows a bit of the complexity that occurs on the company
side of this “simple” experience. The Department View often stirs discussions
among department heads, line managers, and front-line personnel who
relate vivid incidents of when the “simple” process went wrong.
After the finger-pointing and customer stories subside, individuals
quickly begin to identify improvements, innovations, and alternative product
and service configurations that can be deployed at little or no expense.
Employees are frequently surprised by how the Matrix connects depart-
ments and individuals across functions. The customer perspective connects
the downstream and upstream impacts of each department’s activities and
decisions, expanding the employees’ understanding of their roles in the
customer process, while educating them about the rest of the company’s
operations.
This horizontal and departmental customer experience view is highly
summarized and easy to create for your own business. I recommend walk-
ing through this exercise with representatives from these departments to
provoke customer-centric discussions.
Department-to-Department Hand-offs
To ensure customer success, companies must capture and convey customer,
offer, service, and message component information from department to
department. The Department View exposes the departments and individu-
als responsible for each element of each contact; for creating messages;
for delivering the messages; and all other activities related to ensuring the
contact’s success. As contacts and messages become more tailored to spe-
cific customers, reflecting the individual customer’s preferences and context,
the probability for errors grows, as does the cost of recovery. The probability
of errors also increases as products, services, delivery, payments, and fulfill-
ment grow more flexible.
Orchestrating the best outcome from stage-to-stage and department-to-
department is critical, not only to satisfy customer needs, but also to realize
the optimum yield per customer, per contact, and per message slot.

Figure 5.4 Departments-Customer Contacts
The Systems and Processes View
“Can’t Find My Order”—Our Systems are Down View
The CxC Matrix Systems View (Figure 5.5) provides a summarized diagram
depicting the resources and capabilities required to meet each customer’s
expectations. Even this summarized customer story lists 18 different systems
managed by a mix of 17 departments and partners.

56 customer worthy
This level of System View explains the inter-company operations required
to meet a customer’s needs. The view should be easily understandable by
everyone in the company without requiring them to have information tech-
nology, software, domain, or vendor knowledge.
The Systems View can be expanded to a much greater level of detail to
expose each specific system and the system’s functionality. System contact
expansions can expose individual transactions, processes, fields, field values,
business rules, and treatments. This level of information is not necessary
across every system for every contact, but should be used when evaluating
alternative system solutions, upgrading or replacing a system, outsourcing a
system or function, or critiquing the company’s capabilities and performance
for a set of contacts.
Figure 5.5 Customer Process
Awareness
Information
Selection
Negotiation
Contract
Logistics
SupportCustomer
view
receive
email offer
search
research
standard
or deluxe
free for
90 days
terms
conditions
receive
product
product
query
Depart-
ment
• marketing
ecommerce
• marketing
web
• ppc agency
• product
management
• partners
• product
management
• ecommerce
• operations
• distribution
• product
management
• sales
• finance
• sales
• legal
• finance
• operations
• distribution
• shipping
• partner
• customer care
• operations
• training
System • campaign
management
• database
• email
• content
management
• website
management
• social
networking
• ecommerce
• erp
• inventory
• management
• contract
management
• business
process
management
• rules engine
• contract
management
• ecommerce
• order
management
• inventory
management
• vendor
management
• order
management
• email
• customer
relationship
management
• intelligent
router
• resource
management
•VOIP
The graphic below (Figure 5.6) provides a conceptual view of one com-
pany’s customer architecture and includes all of the systems responsible
for delivering customer contacts. This high level customer architecture view
is often used by department managers, information technology managers,

and vendors to initiate discussions about inter-operability, system and data
integration, system and function outsourcing and new technologies, and
vendor software, service, and outsourcing possibilities.
Figure 5.6 Customer Architecture View
Infusing each contact with corporate objectives
This is where technology departments, operations, and business managers
unite their resources, talents, and innovations to execute each contact and
transaction with purpose and with specific and measurable revenue objec-
tives.
The previous CxC Matrix levels depict the state of a company’s customer
experience “as is.” But the CxC Matrix challenges businesses to manage and
grow the value in each consumer stage by setting objectives, identifying the
requirements for meeting specified objectives, and quantifying and measur-
ing the value of each stage and contact.
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.Community
• direct mail
• web
• outbound
telemarketing
• email
• banner ads
• portals
• web
• coupon
• ccm
•vru
• directTV
• aggregators
• ccm
• web
• chat
• service auto
• collaborators
• fulfillment
• web
elogistics
• ecollection
• lock box
• ebilling
• ccm
• CCM
• elogistics
• return
processing
• fulfillment
• web
• ccm
• partners
• web
• contracts
• usage
tracking
• web
• direct mail
• CCM
•VRU
• directTV
• 3G
•personalization
• email
• web
• personalization
• direct sales
• CCM
• loyalty
• continuity
• automated service
• email
• service automation
• fulfillment
• form sharing
• web
• CCM
• chat
•VOLP
• fulfillment
• elogistics
• email
• service alerts
• CCM
• CCM
• email
• self help
• knowledge
base
• chat
• direct mail
• continuity
• enewsletter
• web
• CCM
• eCRM
• portal

58 customer worthy
Figure 5.7 Business Objectives
Awareness
Information
Selection
Negotiation
Contract
Logistics
Support
Customer
view
receive
email offer
search
research
standard
or deluxe
free for
90 days
terms
conditions
receive
product
product
query
Depart-
ment
• marketing
ecommerce
• marketing
web
• ppc agency
• product
management
• partners
• product
management
• ecommerce
• operations
• distribution
• product
management
• sales
• finance
• sales
• legal
• finance
• operations
• distribution
• shipping
• partner
• customer care
• operations
• training
System • campaign
management
• database
email
• content
management
• website
• management
• social
networking
• ecommerce
• erp
• inventory
• management
• contract
management
• business
process
• management
• rules engine
• contract
management
• ecommerce
• order
management
• inventory
management
• vendor
management
• order
management
• email
• customer
relationship
management
• intelligent
router
• resource
management
•VOIP
Objective a. promote
store visit
b. buy
immediately
• up-sell
• promote
brand, service
• up-sell
• promote store
visit
• up-sell
• cross-sell
• service
agreement
• extend
warranty
• loyalty
enrollment
• efficiency
• cross-sell
• referral
• efficiency
• cross-sell
• referral
• loyalty
enrollment
Require-
ment
• offer
management
• email list
• content
• personalized
• web
• in-store
visibility
• localization
• web cookie
• site search
• email cookie
• offer visibility
• customer
profile
• order/offer
management
system
• credit score
• customer id
• dynamic
order
management
• process
• training
• enrollment
• access
• resource
visibility
• training
• incentive
program
• referral
capture
• intelligent
call routing
• training
• incentives
• offer prompts
Value • promotion
• cost potential
value
• search
management
cost
• content cost
• affiliate cost
• affiliate/
partner gain
share
• promotion
cost
• projected
cross-sell
revenue
• affiliate
revenue
• 15% increase
close success
• add-on
revenue
• fees
• revenue
• entry costs
• affiliate fees
• delivery cost
• service fees
• referral bonus
• cost per
minute
• offer cost
• incentive cost
• projected
revenue
By exposing the systems, departments, and parties accountable for each
contact, executives can clearly mandate objectives to the specific managers
responsible for accomplishing them at each contact.
Business objectives may start out simply as “reduce cost” or “introduce

service.” These objectives may be dynamically modified by business, environ-
ment, and market circumstances.
Measuring performance contact-by-contact—
customer contact flow depicts company success
The Matrix delivers a quick view of customer flow and the success of each
customer stage and contact channel. We do this in order to identify where
we have specific contact opportunities to grow revenue and reduce cost.
In this way, the entire company can gather around and ask simple ques-
tions like, “How many customers in Stage One (Awareness) move to Stage
Two (Information)?” Nothing is simpler.
Figure 5.8 Customer Conversion Rate
The percentages show the survivor rate from stage to stage as described
above—they are at the bottom to show the overall survivor rate versus the
survivor rate in each cell.

60 customer worthy
The potential value of each contact is explicitly measured by the number of
customers who pass through the contact and the downstream revenue, mar-
gin, and cost associated with each customer who experienced that contact.
Harness the power of your customer
Core to the CxC Matrix is monetizing each contact. Beyond simply track-
ing the sequence of contacts, the CxC Matrix calculates each contact’s net
financial impact. This is called “monetization.”
Each contact is monetized by looking at its cost and breaking it into
both cost and revenue components. Remember:
Each contact bears a cost.
Each contact has potential revenue, which is related to the
customer’s potential value.
The contact cost includes the cost of the channel/medium, the resources
required for crafting and delivering the message, and all of the fixed and
variable costs associated with contact handling.
You should assign costs to each contact in order to understand and
quantify the impact of changes in customer flow, changes in transactional
or per item costs, and alternative resource and processes options.
A CxC Matrix completed with costs-per-contact filled in clearly shows the
cost advantage of Internet and self-service channels, as well as other lower-
cost contact configurations. However, when customer flow is overlaid onto
the cost Matrix, you can see when customers gravitate to lower-cost chan-
nels and when they prefer higher-cost options. The Matrix provides a realistic
view that usually shows that first time customers initially conduct business
through one combination of contacts, while repeat customers adopt another
combination of contacts across the stages of their consumer cycle.
The CxC Cost Matrix provides a set of tools to depict hypothetical contact
sequence scenarios using estimated customer flow and contact counts. It
•
•

also provides a means for testing and observing service and contact con-
figuration alternatives.
Figure 5.9 Estimated Costs for Contacts
Cost per purchased name $ 0.10 – $150.00
In-person sales call $40.00 – $500.00
Group presentation $350.00 – $3,000.00
Self-service interaction $0.01 – $0.40
At-home sales call $25.00 – $150.00
Outbound telemarketing $8.00 – $35.00
Fax/mail $3.00 – $5.00
Inside sales call $20.00 – $100.00
Inbound telephone support $4.00 – $75.00
Direct mail $0.25 – $12.00
Email $0.03 – $0.60
Inbound referral $20.00 – $500.00
Trade show $100.00 – $6,000.00
Internal website $0.15 – $12.00
Third-party web $0.05 – $200.00
Partner sale $1.00 – $100,000.00
The Matrix provides a means to quantify each contact’s contribution
to a customer’s propensity to purchase, as well as projections for probable
expense and contacts post-sale.
The CxC Matrix requires that every customer contact be inventoried,
monetized, analyzed, and prioritized.
The Simplest Measure
One of the reasons that the CxC Matrix is so powerful is that it stems
from one key measure: did the customer buy something? In the case of the

62 customer worthy
Matrix, this means that success is measured by getting customers to CxC
Matrix Stage Six: Contract. Every other contact has an explicit cost and only
potential revenue.
Stage Six, Contract, is the pivotal moment by which we can measure the
success of all prior stages. For this reason, we measure the success of each
stage from one through five by the percentage of customers who pass from
stage to stage.
The Company View—monetization and “the mower”
Examining the mower program from the company’s perspective uncovers an
enormous number of contacts and the successful and unsuccessful contact
attempts made by the company and the targeted customers.
Employees who are not in marketing or sales can better understand
their customer’s mindset when they become aware of all of the messages
the company directs at customers to generate sales.
The mower campaign targeted 20,000 customers, of which 180 or 0.9
percent actually bought a targeted item (mower, hedge clippers, or barbecue
grill). An additional 230 targeted customers bought something during the
promotion period, but their purchases were not directly attributable to this
campaign.
For the 180 customers who made the target purchase, there were 4,000
customers who did not receive the email; 6,300 received the email but did
not open it. Another 8,900 customers opened the email but did not click on
the highlighted section that would have taken them to the company website.
Eight hundred customers clicked the link, and 270 of them spent more than
three minutes on the site viewing individual product pages. Thirty of the
website visitors bought the targeted product directly from the website. Four
customers went through the entire purchasing process on the website up to
the point in the checkout process when the system requested their credit

card number. Then they abandoned the purchase. Thirty-two customers went
directly to Google from the web page and searched for the featured item.
Figure 5.10 Surviving Customers/Leftover Potential
Awareness
Stage 1
800
270
∂
Identification
Stage 3
270
34
∂
Contract
Stage 6
34
30
∂
Collect $
Stage 9
30
530
∏
236
∏
4
∏
30
∏
What offer/
channel next?
What offer/
channel next?
What offer/
channel next?
What offer/
channel next?
$79,000
potential
What %?
$35,400
potential
What %?
$600
potential
What %?
$600
potential
What %?
Potential assumes $150 per customer; “What %?” calculates next offer success rate.
The Matrix provides a means to quantify each contact’s contribution to a
customer’s propensity to purchase, as well as projections for probable ex-
pense and contacts post-sale.
The rear view window — How did we get here?
The Matrix also correlates service, delivery, repair, and support costs and
activities with earlier customer contacts. So, in addition to calculating the
cost of each incident and the cumulative cost of customer acquisition—
Matrix stages one through six—the Matrix provides insight into which chan-
nels and contacts drive up post-sales expenses. The more detailed Matrix
views and models provide all of the components of the customer experience,
delivering even more information about potential causes and effects of each
prior customer contact.

64 customer worthy
Figure 5.11 Customer Flow, scp
1. Awareness
2. Information
3. Identification
4. Selection
5. Negotiation
6. Contract
7. Logistics
8. Delivery
9. Acceptance
10. $ Collection
11. Use
12. Care/Support
13. Repair
14. Dispose
15. Community
Geography1,4001,00090060025014514513813014513040219130
Digital400145957062585047475045124480
Location300250180351044224400128
Thirdparty1506249444028282019281972141
One-on-one80065042035060011212127390580210413,400
Community3,0502,11716441,099422235238228219254588638237563,679
Totalcustomers
perstage
6,100933473545677187-3109-35-334-51402181
Customer
flow
30.59%22.34%33.15%61.60%44.31%-1.28%4.20%3.95%-15.98%-131.50%-8.67%62.91%76.37%
SCP$$156,600$48,600$95,000$77,400$25,400$1,600$4,000$1,800-$5,800$5,800$27,800$6,400$2,400

In the more detailed case on the prior page (Figure 5.10), the company
estimates that each customer is worth $200 in profits. This number is used
to quickly observe the opportunity available from stage to stage: SCP (Stage
Channel Potential) = the potential additional revenue available per CxC Matrix
stage. SCP factors customer value times the customer's propensity to buy
based on similar customers performance.
Note: Total Customers counts the identifiable customers excluding
anonymous shoppers/visitors and de-duplicating customers appear-
ing in multiple channels within the same customer stage.
These numbers represent a subset of customers that entered the CxC
Matrix on the same day then follows the group for 126 days, the company's
calculated customer lifetime. All values are based on individual company
benchmarks.
The opportunity can be further drilled down to channel, medium, system,
offer, and so forth.
This simple, customer-count-populated Matrix (Figure 5.11) shows the
rate at which customers move from stage to stage, and it represents the
company’s success in closing sales from the customers in stages one through
five. It also shows the customers who fail to move to a subsequent stage,
while also quantifying the total forfeited value lost at each stage.
While no company converts 100 percent of its customers from stage to
stage, this Matrix view quickly monetizes the potential value resident in each
cell—stage and channel combination—and provides an estimate of the total
amount of profit to be gained by creating incremental improvements at each
customer stage and contact. The detailed contact view shows the potential
profit resident in each cell, which managers can use to make investment
decisions regarding the tactics best suited to grow performance. The same
Matrix view then provides ongoing monitoring of tactical success.
Monetization is a primary benefit of the CxC Matrix because it links
specific business decisions, that is, which messages to present and

66 customer worthy
what their content should be, to long-term customer value.
The monetization of contacts—the core concept of the CxC Matrix—is
implemented through the monetization of slots.
Companies generally assess the cost of an employee’s completion of a
task such as the per-item cost of billing, ordering, inventory, delivery,
shelf space, and so forth. Some companies go so far as to calculate
expenses associated with assessing customer fitness or worthiness
through customer verifications, credit checks, demographics and seg-
mentations, and customer file assessments, but few try to assess a
customer’s “future value” by estimating the amount of revenue the
customer will generate over a lifetime.
The Matrix highlights where your customer ceases to have contacts,
providing a date stamp and all of the earlier contact activities. The
stages where most customers are lost should be examined for correc-
tive action and treatments that grow revenue. Using customer lifetime
value as a metric, you can calculate the benefits of improving indi-
vidual Matrix cell performance by estimating the increase in customers
who move through to the contract stage.
Recommended CxC Matrix monetization applications
Strategy
Value calculations can help make major investment decisions such as
whether to expand plant capacity, launch a new product line, or change
service levels. Managers construct a scenario for each option and compare
the expected values. Unlike scenarios built using conventional techniques,
scenarios based on the CxC Matrix ensure that all implications of a given
choice are considered. For example, a model for adding a new product line
would include the expected change in customer service volume. This helps
to avoid unanticipated results that can reduce or even reverse the benefits
of a superficially attractive option.

Revenue Enhancement
Every customer contact is an opportunity to increase customer value. By
assigning an explicit value to the contact, monetization encourages more
efficient use of contacts that may be executed with little thought or ignored
altogether. For example, many firms never think to include advertisements
in packages they ship to customers. Others throw in a copy of their catalog
but don’t measure the resulting sales. Only a handful of companies are
thorough enough to measure the value of sales from their own catalog
and compare it with revenue they would generate if a third party paid to
insert its materials instead. A comprehensive inventory of customer contacts
uncovers more opportunities than most businesses realize, from Google ad
placement on a website, to messages embedded in call-on-hold scripts, to
cross-sell offers made at the close of a customer service inquiry to simply
asking your customers whether they know the name of someone else that
could benefit from your products and services.
Operations
Because monetization calculates the change in long-term value resulting
from each contact, it gives operational managers a way to measure their
group’s contribution to the entire organization. This avoids the departmental
myopia that can lead to decisions that are good for one area but harmful to
the larger organization. For example, a purchasing organization might find
it can save money by using a lower quality supplier, even after allowing for
direct impacts such as increased service costs, higher returns, and larger
warranty expenses. But a comprehensive customer value analysis would
include impacts on other departments, such as lower revenues from loss of
repeat business, fewer sales of other company products, and fewer referrals
by enthusiastic customers. This might result in a different decision that is
ultimately better for the company as a whole.
Forecasting
Exposing the impact of each customer contact creates a company-wide
network of risks and opportunity sensors that enable execution nimbleness.

68 customer worthy
The financial measures underlying monetization are based on projections of
non-financial measures such as advertising impressions, sales calls, contact
center call volumes, website visits, opened emails, metered product and
service usage, and purchase quantities. These can be used to build budgets
and forecasts. Because the budgets are based on projections for specific
inputs, financial variances can also be traced to specific sources.
Improved Predictive Model Performance
Traditional forecasts are often based on statistical models that predict results
without describing the underlying business activities that cause them. This
makes it much harder to analyze the causes of any deviations. Similarly,
because the CxC Matrix projects customer activities over time, any revised
projections automatically include the future impact of past variances. Thus,
a shortfall in sales this quarter will automatically result in lower projections
for service calls in the future, making it easier for companies to understand
the true implications of their current results.

69
CHAPTER 6
Managing Customers Contact-by-Contact
Up to this point, we have charted one customer’s footsteps through the
Matrix to illustrate how the Matrix’s core elements operate. But the Matrix
is designed to provide insight into how each element in every customer
contact performs across your company’s entire customer base.
The contact and experience permutations portrayed in the CxC Matrix
are staggering when you consider the potential number of combinations of
messages, slots, containers, variable attributes, and customers across each
customer life stage. This is the challenge the Matrix is designed to meet. It
provides insight and management capability for each message in each slot
in each contact.
Mindset and a toolset
The CxC Matrix is the foundation of the Think Like a Customer (TLC) manage-
ment methodology that encourages all employees and stakeholders to be
customer-centric, designing every business decision around the customer,
while emphasizing strict measurement and company-wide transparency.
The methodology strives to connect business strategy and objectives to
customer contacts and activities.
The process is designed to provide everyone in your company with a
view of their role as it relates to customers, while providing a means to
document decision-making guidelines, procedures, and standards to govern
each customer contact. The TLC method provides a means for companies to
realize the optimum return per customer contact and is designed to work in
conjunction with existing performance measures, systems, and policies.

70 customer worthy
Visualize the customer experience
Before you can affect customer performance, your company must
collectively understand its customers’ experiences.
One of the visual Matrix’s greatest benefits is that it invites participation and
innovation from the broadest spectrum of employees at a company.
Figure 6.1 Customer Process
The outcome of each contact, where the business process intersects the customer process, is
determined by the decisions used to conduct each contact. Result is, ultimately, lifetime value:
(direct revenue + affiliate revenue + referrals) – cumulative contacts cost.
“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify!” —Henry David Thoreau
When designing or rethinking the design of any system, it helps if every-
one involved has a “picture” of what is being proposed. Unlike an engineering
drawing, the CxC Matrix is designed to:

6: Managing Customers Contact-by-Contact 71
Provide a visual picture of the intersection of customer stages and
company processes.
Help identify potential customer interaction system shortfalls.
CxC Matrix components and mechanics
Fifteen Customer Stages Mirror the Customer Journey
The 15 Matrix stages in the consumer cycle are designed to align with stan-
dard corporate functions including technology systems, process designs,
department responsibilities, in-house and outsourced service arrangements,
and standard metrics, such as Six Sigma, APQC, or National Retail Federa-
tion. Although the standard set of CxC Matrix stages cover a wide range of
businesses, other labels could be used if they were more appropriate to a
particular situation.
The Matrix stages generally occur in a fixed sequence from left to right
on the standard Matrix diagram. But there will always be exceptions. A dam-
aged product may be replaced before it is used or a product purchased on
credit may be delivered before payment is collected. A customer may repeat
portions of the sequence, for example, by selecting an alternate product if
negotiations on the initial selection are unsuccessful. There may be multiple
contacts within the same stage—most buyers make several visits to a house
before they buy it.
In more complex purchases and particularly business purchases, where
the buyer may be a multi-party entity, individual stages may be managed by
separate departments or multiple departments and people. For example, a
company may decide that it requires a larger office space, so it establishes
a committee to evaluate options, gather information regarding alternatives,
review and narrow choices, and negotiate the purchase or lease.
In this case, a seller or broker may be dealing with a subset of the deci-
sion-making entity and likely cannot see the breadth of the customer’s
available choices nor the full breadth of the customer’s collective needs.
1.
2.

72 customer worthy
Figure 6.2
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.Community
1. Customer becomes aware of need
2. Customer gathers information regarding filling the need
3. Customer identifies potential options and sources to satisfy need
4. Customer selects product(s), service(s), provider(s), to satisfy need requirements
5. Customer negotiates all aspects of acquiring product or service
6. Customer legally commits to product purchase and specifications
7. Customer establishes criteria for receipt
8. Product or service is delivered to customer
9. Customer accepts or rejects product/service
10. Customer pays for product and/or services
11. Customer uses product
12. Customer cares for product, learns about product
13. Customer fixes, repairs product
14. Customer disposes, sells, destroys product
15. Customer participates in “word-of-mouth” product/service community
Stage 1: Awareness is the customer’s starting point. The customer
has made the decision to make an investment of his or her time and
interest in pursuing something. The customer has a need, although
perhaps not a clearly defined need. It may be generated by a feeling,
a curiosity, a life event, a situation, a desire to replace something, a
whim, an urge, or an impulse.
Email spam does not count as a“contact”. . .
unless a customer reads it
Your company pays to generate billions of customer contacts through adver-
tising, public relations, email blasts, telemarketing, and unattended events
such as webinars, webcasts, online videos, or fax on demand. The customer’s

awareness and participation in the activity is essential. If the customer
does not see the email because it is blocked, the contact is not counted by
either the customer or the CxC Matrix. If a telemarketer does not speak to
a customer or leaves a message that the customer deletes immediately, the
contact is not counted. If an advertising insert in an envelope is discarded
without ever being viewed, it is not counted.
In order for a customer to be counted in the awareness stage, the cus-
tomer must have some activity, known or anonymous, in that stage. The
customer must participate.
Inference
Some customers are not individually identifiable until “Stage 3: Identifica-
tion” or at “Stage 5: Negotiation,” choosing to remain anonymous while
conducting earlier stages. For example, the customer may have worked with
a third party or broker, or he may have worked anonymously, through the
web, a pseudonym, or another less detectable means.
A customer who suddenly appears in a stage without links to prior stages,
especially a first-time customer, may also indicate fraud. For example, a
customer may appear in the repair stage, requesting a refund, or appear at
Stage 12: Care and Support, with no record of a purchase.
CxC Matrix channels
Channels represent the physical, digital, and virtual locations where cus-
tomer contacts occur. A sample list includes call centers, retail stores, email
messages, invoices, web review sites, delivery labels, packaging, websites,
magazine ads, coupons, chat rooms, in-field sales agents, welcome screen
messages, partners, promotional items, independent resellers, the product
and service itself, wholesalers, outsourced customer contact centers, the
ever-expanding array of electronic customer-to-company contact points,
and every vehicle in which a customer has contact with a product or brand
and the product or brand’s image, mention, and effects.

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Figure 6.3 Mapping the Customer Journey by Channel
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.CareSupport
13.Repair
14.Dispose
15.Community
Geography TV
Community
events
Radio
Outdoor
Signage
Magazines
Digital Banner ads
Website
Company email
Campaign man-
agement email
Support email
Sales click for
chat
Location In-store
promotions
Kiosks
Third party Package inserts
Private-label
partners
Affiliate offers
One-on-one Inbound
telemartketing
Online customer
support
Billing
statements
Shipments
Door-to-door
Catalog
Customer service
Statement
inserts
Service click for
chat
Direct mail
Outbound
telemartketing
Community Press/trade
magazines
Blogs
Craigslist.com

The high level CxC Matrix classifies channels into six categories that
closely represent customers’ expectations for service, intimacy, and urgency:
Geography, Digital, Location, Third Party, One-on-One, and Community.
CxC Matrix channel categories—fast-easy-simple
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.Community
Geography
Digital
Location
Third party
One-on-one
Community
Where do I go from here?
These broad channel categories represent starting points for the customer
as well as for constructing a CxC Matrix. Imagine, again, thinking like a cus-
tomer. How do I begin to search for your product or service? I likely search
online (digital), go to a store, office, or mall (location), call a friend, peer,
or advisor (community), contact a current vendor or reseller (third party), or
open a catalog, email, or contact from my past (one-on-one). Customers
have different expectations for service, convenience, time, and intimacy
based on which channel category they choose to contact the company. A
customer has different expectations when asking questions face to face in a
store or at an office in Stage 3: Identification, versus when shopping online.
The customer has different expectations for what can be accomplished, the

76 customer worthy
timeliness and thoroughness of a product presentation, and the question
and answer exchange.
Figure 6.5 Types of Advertising Trusted by Internet Users Worldwide, April 2007
(% of respondents)
Note: n=26,486; *i.e., word-of-mouth
Source: The Nielsen Company, “Online Global Consumer Study” as cited in press release, October 1, 2007,
www.eMarketer.com
It is the customer view—you live where?
A customer’s experience is consistently influenced by his environment, and
I define this environment a couple of different ways:
Geography
Weather, seasons, laws, politics, convenience, distance to location—all of
these related issues affect a customer’s experience from the requirement
to use a product to the product’s attributes. Do I need air conditioning in
my car? Is a convertible practical? What about snow tires?

Contact vehicles in the geography channel category include newspa-
pers, broadcast and regional television, sales and distribution territories,
and fulfillment and delivery networks such as postal routes, delivery routes,
sales territories, distribution licenses, service agreements, travel routes, and
licensing conditions.
Digital
Includes the set of contacts a customer has via the World Wide Web or
web-connected device such as a wireless phone, personal digital assistant
(PDA), in-vehicle navigation and information systems, and blast email or
other unaddressed electronic message vehicles.
For example, a customer can access a company website and spend time
navigating and searching, or downloading information without logging in or
providing any personal information. This anonymous activity is classified in
the digital category. Once the customer enters personal information, which
may or may not identify that customer as a current customer or return
visitor, the category shifts to one-on-one. While companies may use web
session cookies and other means to track returning customers and capture
web and other digital exposures, the contacts are classified as digital until
the customer acknowledges identification or a desire to be identified.
The digital channel category does not typically include addressable
electronic contacts, opt-in electronic messages, email, text messages, or
messages delivered via registered website visits, which are classified in the
one-on-one channel category.
Location
Includes the set of contacts that take place in a store, office, trade show
booth, kiosk, or other single, fixed, physical location. It is best to think of
channels in the location category as destinations: physical places the cus-
tomer must travel to. In some cases, customers and company representatives
must each travel to a location to meet, such as a trade show.

78 customer worthy
Third Party
Includes all addressable third party entities that sell, resell, distribute, influ-
ence, and review a company’s products and services. Addressable means that
the company has direct communication and a formal or informal relation-
ship/dialogue with the third party. For example, resellers, non-captive sales
agents, registered financing companies, all forms of registered partners and
vendors, news editors/advertorials, paid reviewers, and analysts are classified
in the third party category.
One-on-One
Includes all direct contacts with a customer that appear to be personal-
ized and bi-directional from the customer's perspective. One-om-One con-
tacts require individual customer information and often make use of some
customer database, contact management system, or integrated access of
multiple sales, operations, order management, contact management, and
other systems.
Community
Includes all of the channels and contacts that exist outside a company’s con-
trol: word-of-mouth mentions, product and service reviews, news, and press
exposures, social networking, web forums, unplanned product and service
exposure, after-market sales and contacts, inter-customer bartering, trading,
collecting, fan and hater clubs, websites, independent and unsponsored user
groups, independent sellers, re-packagers, aggregators, disaggregators and
their sales, service, refurbishing, refinishing, and repair networks.
Customers exist in communities where they exchange information with
people of similar interests and needs. A person with a need often seeks a
community solution through a referral, recommendation, or other word-of-
mouth means for assessing purchase, usage, and care options.

“‘A person like me’ has become the most credible source of information about
a company or a product, increasing from 20% in 2003 to 68% today.”
—Edelman Trust Barometer
Community: Life Stage 15 and Channel Domain
39% of the online population, 57 million American adults, regu-
larly read blogs
Approximately 175,000 new blogs are created each day
Approximately 1.6 million blog posts are made per day, equivalent
to 18 posts per second
Source: Pew Internet; Technorati
The importance of community
Community has always been a major source of customer contacts. Commu-
nity is the place where customers exchange their experiences about product
and service performance, quality, price, product use, customer service, and
adventures.
Communities used to be considered primarily as organic, local groups
for customers with similar interests who were bound by proximity and com-
munication restraints. With advances in the World Wide Web and com-
munication channels, special interest groups, and hobbyists, all sorts of
people can inexpensively (and without restraint) attack brands, companies,
products, and industries. Advances in web technologies enable customers to
not only exchange stories and commentary, but also purchase, service, resell,
and execute contacts across every Matrix stage via the community channel.
Customers can buy on Amazon, Craigslist, or eBay and receive customer sup-
port from a self-described fan or fan group in a web forum or blog. They can
receive expert product use and repair advice and services through websites
like Elance, ITToolbox, Angieslist, Guru.com, Getafreelance, or TDWI. Custom-
ers have access to thousands of community category channels.
•
•
•

80 customer worthy
Matrix contacts retail banking breadcrumb trail
Even a simple Matrix like the banking one below, representing a banking
customer’s contact activity for the past 30 days, clearly shows which chan-
nels the customer prefers to use for different activities. Just as importantly,
it shows which channels he or she prefers not to use. Gaining better under-
standing of how customers use contacts to conduct their business with your
company illuminates opportunities for designing new services and service
combinations and configurations, while also excluding or reducing invest-
ment in other contact areas.
Figure 6.6
This customer received messages trying to up-sell and cross-sell services
through eleven awareness generating channels. He then used a combination
of the branch, the online bank, an event and the call center to research and
select a service. He also performed some research about the bank’s com-
munity involvement prior to attempting to purchase a service at the branch,
through the online banking service, and by email. The customer had some

problem with the account as evidenced by the combination of support and
repair contacts before he closed his account and cancelled his new service in
the branch after trying to close his account at the ATM. He started complain-
ing about the bank’s service on Facebook while contacting support, where
he also discussed his repair and disposal sentiments.
What about eBay and The New York Times?
How certain third-party channels are classified may depend upon how your
company uses them more than how the customer perceives the channel’s
operation. For example, a customer in search of a particular machine part
may search on Google and find a seller at eBay, along with search links from
the part manufacturer, a number of reseller distributors, and miscellaneous
after-market providers. The customer may choose the eBay seller based on
price and shipping terms without knowing that the seller is actually the
manufacturer. This manufacturer simply chose to leverage eBay as a sales
channel, but it is not obligated under the same warranty or service require-
ments as it is when it sells the product part directly. So, what appears as
a set of community contacts to the customer may actually be third-party
contacts through eBay.
In a similar instance, a favorable product mention and review in an
article may appear to a customer as unbiased, unscripted advice. Therefore,
it appears to be a community contact. But if the review is written from
information provided in a press release where the company may or may
not also be an advertiser in the publication, sometimes referred to as an
“advertorial,” the customer’s reading of the review should be classified as
a third-party contact.
“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell
6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell
6,000 friends.”
—Jeff Bezos, Amazon

82 customer worthy
Experience Matrix communities—clarity through chaos
In the past, individuals in communities had faint voices and small impact
through word-of-mouth, only gaining recognition when they got louder
through a published letter to the editor or commentary in some other broad-
cast media. Today, individuals regularly create tremendous influence through
user-generated media like blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, user forums,
chat commentary, and a growing number of social networking venues.
While your company’s investment and participation in community may
have been seen as insignificant or arbitrary in the past, Internet and digital
communications have changed company and community relations forever.
Your managers might ask, “Why pay attention to community?” Since
communities by definition are unmanaged, uncontrollable, and unpredict-
able, why bother? Because communities can be influenced, persuaded and
leveraged. Communities can be put to work not just to get the word out,
but also to create “the word” and package and deliver a message.
“Up to 25% of the entertainment being consumed in five years will be what
we call‘circular’. . . people will have a genuine desire not only to create and
share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up, and pass it on within
their peer groups.”
—Mark Selby, Vice President Multimedia, Nokia, December 2007
Angry and exuberant customer messages can make or break a new mar-
ket entry, a product, or a brand. This challenges you to continually maintain
awareness of what is being said about your company in multiple channels
and to remain alert to changes in community sentiments. Resources and
messages must be prepared at every contact point to ensure that the right
message and response is delivered.
The CxC Matrix helps you measure the impact of communities on all of
the other channels and customer stages.
As a channel, communities cross-pollinate information with other chan-

nels such as digital, geography, and third party. Message and information
artifacts are spread through word-of-mouth and customer folklore. Custom-
ers tell stories of alternate uses for products or how they received exceptional
service under the direst circumstances.
The CxC Matrix treats “community” as both a stage in the consumer
cycle and a channel since customers freely contribute information and com-
mentary to communities while they access information from communities
throughout their customer experiences.
Companies traditionally participate in communities through third parties
and in external activities, as well as under the budget categories of “public
relations” and “charitable giving.” While these types of community give-
backs may be truly altruistic, your company measurably benefits from the
local visibility that sways public sentiment, particularly in times of corporate
trouble or when seeking approval from local politicians and special interest
groups. A common justification for spending in the community is helping
to promote a positive brand image.
Customers know when companies are lying
Walmart’s public relations firm thought it had a good idea. Why not create
a blog in which an average American couple travels across America in a
recreational vehicle and stays in Walmart parking lots? Many middle-class
Americans would relate to their adventures and get a warm, fuzzy feeling
about Walmart as a place to shop. The problem was that nowhere on the
blog was it revealed that Walmart was paying for all the expenses of the
blogging couple. It didn’t take long for the promotional tactic to be revealed
and brought to a halt.
In faking a blog, Walmart and its advertising agency was experimenting
in a new channel category—community—where rules of engagement and
disclosure have not yet been clearly defined. They certainly exposed the need
to distinguish paid advertising and paid storytelling from user-contributed
blogs and stories.

84 customer worthy
Similar mistakes frequently happen in the digital community. Product
and company reviews sometimes seem a little too clean, polished, and
detailed to believe that an average customer took the time and effort to
write them on a whim. Certainly, some customers do write extensive, fact-
laden reviews and commentary, but if fewer than three percent of customers
ever report complaints, imagine the odds of a customer writing a review, let
alone a comprehensive product walk-through.
It’s one thing for a company to write a review.
It’s a whole other thing for a company to delete
community information.
“On November 17th, 2005, an anonymous Wikipedia user deleted 15 para-
graphs from an article on e-voting machine-vendor Diebold, excising an
entire section critical of the company’s machines. While anonymous, such
changes typically leave behind digital fingerprints offering hints about the
contributor, such as the location of the computer used to make the edits. In
this case, the changes came from an IP address reserved for the corporate
offices of Diebold itself. And it is far from an isolated case. A new data-mining
service . . . traces millions ofWikipedia entries to their corporate sources, and,
for the first time, puts comprehensive data behind longstanding suspicions
of manipulation, which until now have surfaced only piecemeal in investiga-
tions of specific allegations.”
Source: John Borland, Wired News, August 19, 2007, © John Borland.
Company trust will continue to be tested as advocates, loyal customers,
loyal employees, interested third parties, and competitors alike participate in
anonymous communities to add and subtract stories and comments.

How powerful are digital communities?
I think they elected the President of the United States
The power of leveraging communities to achieve a specific goal was evident
in the 2008 United States Presidential Election. Barack Obama enlisted a
digital community of over five million “friends” across a network of social
networking sites and his own hosted site, MyBarackObama. The Obama
campaign leveraged the “unmanageable” channels by providing a variety
of tools and gadgets in each of the digital spaces to help individuals take
ownership of the campaign’s popular messages.
The campaign provided content to be shared and modified using each
web platform’s technologies, including notes, photos, news feeds, posted
items, video messages, tags, event posts, invitations, friend requests, profile
pages, and fan walls. It fueled a motivated audience and leveraged all of the
viral aspects of the digital community while likely educating a lot of new
users to the many “cool” technical capabilities in each application.
The immediate statistics are overwhelming:
Community McCain Obama
Facebook 620,359 2,379,102
MySpace: Friends 217,811 833,161
Twitter: Followers 4,603 112,474
YouTube: Channel Views 2,032,993 18,413,110
Additionally, MyBarackObama hosted over two million profiles, con-
nected 200,000 offline events, and served nearly half a million blog posts.
Channel and media expectations differ from customer
to company
HURRY I REALLY NEED HELP WITH MY CHECKING ACCOUNT: texting is
fastest right? No? How about email? No? Then what . . .
On its website, PNC Bank tells customers not to submit text messages
or emails to the bank because they may be intercepted by third parties

86 customer worthy
or not received by appropriate business units at the bank. The bank
asks customers to call its toll-free number or write instead.
This is not meant to ridicule PNC Bank. Most companies currently choose
not to handle email, text messages, or other quick and easy channels with
the urgency in which they are sent.
PNC discourages customers from using email as an contact channel to
communicate with the bank, stating that it “may not be secure, may be
intercepted.” While these types of disclosures exist in small print in most
contacts, it is unlikely that customers ever read them. This only causes
greater customer frustration when the customer experiences the effects of
“may not be immediately received by the appropriate business unit at PNC.”
The bank does not insert any caveats or warnings about sending a letter,
nor does it ensure that the appropriate business unit will receive a letter.
Just imagine the cost of manually handling each of these contacts and their
follow-up. There must be a better way!
Of course, there are good reasons for discouraging certain contacts and
practices, and the biggest reasons are cost and liability. The cost of customer
service personnel to respond to text messages and emails is exorbitant, not
to mention the cost and liability associated with emails that may have been
blocked, email blasts designed to overwhelm companies, and so on. The list
of excuses goes on and on.
Customers have different service, response, access, and intimacy expec-
tations related to each CxC Matrix channel category and their needs at each
stage in the consumer cycle. For example, a customer dealing one-on-one
with a company by phone, chat, or even postal mail has different expecta-
tions of response time than a person who is face-to-face with a sales rep-
resentative at a physical location. Likewise, if a customer is dealing with an
online, third party intermediary looking to negotiate price on a large ticket
item, the customer will have different expectations than if he is online on
the company-managed order page or on the phone with the company’s
in-house service representative. Customers have different expectations in
each channel for information (Can I try it on? Can I take it for a test drive?),

identification (I have five websites open at the same time sorting each by
price), product delivery, and payment terms.
Companies control some channels, whereas third parties own others.
Channels may also be reached through other channels. For example, a web-
site may be available through an in-store kiosk, and a call center may be
reached at an airport check-in counter.
Contacts
Although the customer must be aware of your company’s involvement in a
contact, your company is not always aware of your customer. Contacts such
as exposure to a public billboard, viewing an in-store product display, and
daily product use can occur without your customer being identified. Even
direct contacts, such as telephone inquiries, may not be recorded, or they
may be recorded without linking them to a specific customer.
A benefit of the Matrix is that the need to identify contacts leads compa-
nies to consider new ways to record exposures and capture responses. This is
a particularly important opportunity today when technologies such as Radio
Frequency Identification (RFID) tags, self-diagnosis and repair functionality,
and web-connected smart devices generate enormous amounts of data that
can potentially be linked to customers.
“Wow me”— Every contact should be an“event”
“When the customer opens the box each month, we want it to be an event
filled with excitement, curiosity, and pleasure. Each opening of the box must
stick out in customers’memories.The coffee memory and the box memories
are intertwined and critical to customer tenure and up-sells.”
—Executive at major coffee membership company
Customers want to be wowed. They want to be impressed, acknowledged,
entertained, and served in ways that merit attention, such as “opening the

88 customer worthy
box.” The box referred to above is from a company that delivers coffee on
a periodic basis as part of a membership or continuity program. Coffee
arrives at the customer’s home or office based on the frequency specified
by the customer. The box’s exterior is brown and unexceptional except for a
large color imprint of the brand’s name. The company carefully selects and
arranges the items in the box and plans the messages and sensory experi-
ences that opening the box will generate.
The coffee company deliberately and effectively uses the box opening as
a platform to reinvigorate the customer’s perception of its brand. This mea-
surably benefits customer retention, cross-sales, gift sales, and referrals. The
company also includes additional offers in each box, using the customer’s
information, demographics, coffee consumption and taste preferences to
determine which products and messages should be packed and in what
order. For example, the box may contain a sweepstakes entry form if the
customer’s modeled profile indicates he responds to that sort of thing. The
box may contain a sample of a new coffee or tea that is coming to market
which might grow his monthly consumption. Each element of each box is
carefully crafted to create the optimum customer response. It’s designed to
create a delighted, enthusiastic customer and ideally to prompt the customer
to share the event with others by word-of-mouth, as a gift, or as a referral.
Some contacts should be memorable, but sometimes business models
perform best when contacts go unnoticed. E-ZPass is one such example,
where a customer’s payment account is automatically debited each time the
customer’s vehicle passes through a highway toll booth or exits a parking
lot that is a member of the E-ZPass payment network. E-ZPass makes the
“collection” stage a non-event for its subscribers.
Summary
Contacts represent any connection between a customer and a company. The
CxC Matrix classifies contacts along two major dimensions: channel and
stages in the consumer cycle. Stage reflects customer needs and attributes,

while channel represents company resources and behavior. Within a channel,
contacts are further classified by container, system, and slot.
In the context of a given contact, each slot can be assigned a specific
value representing its potential impact on the long-term value of the indi-
vidual customer. Companies can optimize customer value by optimizing
use of their slots. Treatments apply business rules to manage a contact’s
components and coordinate messages during each contact. Treatments are
the mechanism to manage the customer experience and optimize relation-
ship value.

90
Chapter 7
Nine Treatment Objectives for Each Contact
Every customer contact should strive to achieve the following nine objec-
tives:
Identify Customer: “Repeat Customer,” “First Time Customer,” or
“Anonymous”
Recognize Customer: connect customer’s history, preferences,
values
Fulfill: meet customer’s original purpose for this contact
Upgrade: motivate customer to upgrade current product or
service
Cross-sell: another product, service, or partner’s service
Expand: invite customer to graduate to higher customer tier, i.e.,
loyalty program, newsletter/email sign-up, event invite, complete
“my profile”
Educate: teach customer about the company, available channels,
special interests, best practices, or how to use its products
Collect: data about the customer and experience
Generate Referrals: leverage the customer relationship to gather
names of prospects
You should evaluate how well each contact meets a standard set of treat-
ment objectives. This can identify opportunities for improvement and find
misalignments between customer needs and actual treatments, as well as
identify the contacts with the greatest potential for improvement.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.

7: Nine Treatment Objectives for Each Contact 91
You (should have) had me at“Hello”
Identify Customer
The first objective of each contact should be to establish whether the
customer is a repeat customer, first time customer, anonymous, or other.
Think of this as having caller ID at every customer contact point. This initial
identification dictates the contact’s messaging and objectives to best suit
the customer’s situation. If the customer is a repeat, then the system and
container, person, website, and customer service representative (CSR) should
readily be able to leverage the customer’s history, stated preferences, and
modeled preferences.
First time customers entering an experience stage have different expecta-
tions, needs, concerns, and questions than repeat customers. Anonymous
and unidentifiable customers contacting sales or service or just shopping
can only be assisted to the extent that they express their intentions and
needs. They should be encouraged and motivated to register and identify
themselves based on the benefits they will receive in future contacts.
Customer identification can occur in several forms from an automated
screen pop-up on a website that says, “Welcome back! Would you like to
continue from where you left off on your last visit?” or a confirmation screen
or in-person introduction that asks, “First time customer?”
Recognize Customer
Once a customer has been identified, you should be able to access and use
the customer’s prior contacts, purchase history, and service history to inform
the current contact of what should take place. At a minimum, it is important
to know and acknowledge whether the customer had prior contacts and
to somehow acknowledge the customer’s investment of time and effort.
Recognizing a customer may be as simple as a “Welcome back” greeting
in a store followed by, “Are you still looking for the right blender?” It could
involve making a reference to a previous purchase or service inquiry on the
phone or on the web, followed by a relevant offer or recommendation based
on the customer’s profile and history.

92 customer worthy
Many companies use customer segmentation to make prospects and
customers recognizable across an organization and all of its channels. Plati-
num, gold, and silver levels and loyalty programs are obvious customer
recognition tags that can be used to designate and prepare treatments in
each contact and channel.
Other forms of recognition include identifying not just the customer’s
current or future value, but also the customer’s condition. Does the cus-
tomer have an urgent need? Is the customer in danger with broken glass
in packaging? Does the customer’s livelihood depend on a good customer
experience?
Customer service representatives are often trained to probe for these
types of conditions to quickly identify and resolve a customer problem.
Salespeople are trained to uncover the customer’s decision criteria and situ-
ation in order to script a sales experience that raises the probability that a
customer will buy.
Recognizing a customer in a contact in the CxC Matrix means that the
customer’s situation is taken into account to create the best outcome for
the customer and the company.
Fulfill
Simply deliver what the customer expects in this contact—quickly and effi-
ciently satisfy her needs based on her values, relationship to date, and chan-
nel capabilities.
While “Fulfill” seems simple and obvious, it is often difficult to achieve
and most frustrating to the customer fixated on her single objective.
“What Ifs?” Quick Test
If a customer calls and wants 100 units of your product immedi-
ately, how does your company respond?
What if the customer goes to your website and wants to buy 100
units with cash right now? What would that experience look like?
•
•

Would he need to enter multiple single orders? Would he be
billed and invoiced separately?
What if a customer calls to cancel your service or return your
product or if he tries to cancel or arrange a return online?
Most often, customers do not know the best solution, the best product
configuration, or the best means to return a defective product. The
CxC Matrix is meant to help expose the best available options at the
customer’s point of contact.
Upgrade
Each customer contact is an opportunity to strengthen the relationship. Each
contact should seek to upgrade relationships to their next level. For exam-
ple, invite customers to join a loyalty program and receive ongoing email,
text, offers, news, and best practice communications. Encourage customers
to join a frequent buyer program, automatic replenishment, or automatic
renewing service program to protect their investments and make ongoing
purchases and service easier.
Ask customers to buy in every contact. Encourage customers that call
customer support to buy the latest and greatest product version to replace
their obsolete product or service.
Cross-sell
Every contact should be evaluated for its ability to sell another product or
service, either from your company or from a partner company. Companies
should design propositions delivered through treatments that best fit the
needs of the customer at each stage in each channel and continuously test
what sells best and grows total customer lifetime value.
Expand
Each contact is a milestone that should strengthen, not weaken, the rela-
•

94 customer worthy
tionship. Expanding the relationship means expanding the customers’ par-
ticipation in the company network and community, encouraging them to
use, access, experience, and buy other services.
A simple customer relationship expansion objective is to encourage cus-
tomers to experience another channel: explore the web, visit a store, use a
coupon from the web, or recruit customers to special events.
Loyalty programs, newsletter subscriptions, customer alert subscrip-
tions, and events are all methods of expanding customer relationships and
growing company and brand exposures.
Educate
Educate customers on your business, on your processes, and on how to bet-
ter use your product, services, and resources for their benefit. Be the single
source and primary conduit to best practices for your most valuable custom-
ers. Provide links to community websites, forums, and commentary.
Collect
Collect and store data from every customer contact, transaction, and interac-
tion. Ideally, collect data about the quality of the contact and the customer’s
perceptions of how the contact was conducted. Record the data used to
determine each treatment, the personal information, questions, answers,
activities, and entities associated with each contact. Capture all of the ele-
ments and attributes associated with each contact in order to best under-
stand the customer’s experience and opportunities, as well as to improve
the performance of future contacts.
“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring
their friends.”
—Walt Disney

Generate Referrals
Every contact should ask for referrals:
Coupons for friends in an envelope.
Offer emails with simple forwarding instructions.
Invitations for friends and colleagues to attend social events.
Asking customers on support calls if they know of anyone else
who can use such a solution.
Message allocation from segmentation to syndication
Customize and Personalize Messages at the Right Cost-justifiable Level
Figure 7.1 Appropriate Targeting
Syndication:
“What would Google do . . .”
Affiliation:
“Customers like you also like . . .”
Commercialization:
“Your message here”
Predictive Modeling:
“Dear Miguel, special offer just for you . . .”
Personalization:
“Dear Miguel . . .”
Behavioral Segmentation:
“Dear Customer, about your purchase . . .”
Demographic Segmentation:
“Dear homeowner . . .”
Geographic:
“Dear Neighbor, the season is changing, it’s time to . . .”
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96 customer worthy
It is common marketing sense to customize messages where you can do
so efficiently. The tone, language, and benefits statement in a television
advertisement or letter sent to the east coast of the United States will be
different from a letter sent to the Midwest. Likewise, an offer for outsourced
technology services sent to health care companies should be different from
the same services offered to auto parts distributors. Different pictures and
different language will raise the success of the marketing tactic.
You should strive to speak the customer’s language as efficiently and
cost-effectively as possible. Customers have been conditioned to reject
offers, providers, and messages that do not target them appropriately.
Combine customer knowledge, technology, and creativity
for customer-centric messages
Whether addressing an envelope with a person’s familiar name or greeting a
person in a store with “sir” or “madam,” personalization or recognizing the
individual helps you engage with customers at a deeper level. Personaliza-
tion is used to create trust and confidence between the customer and your
company, agent, and brand.
Customers expect to be recognized as repeat customers or as frequent
visitors. “Being recognized” respects customers’ investments in your com-
pany’s brand and their previous buying process activities as they gather
information, select services, learn more about offers, or call for support
and assistance.
In the customer “Need, Shop, Buy” scenario, most of the messages con-
tained in the slots are personalized using data the company collected from
past purchases and contacts, plus personal data purchased from aggregators
like Acxiom, Experian, Nielsen, Abacus, Dun Bradstreet, and others. The CxC
Matrix encourages you to leverage information about customer interests,
income, lifestyle, family composition, finances, and other available informa-
tion to enhance and model customers’ values and preferences.
Additionally, you should use market and trade data combined with loca-

tion, geography, and economic data to assess macro elements on customer
performance. Internal information about locations, inventory, services, cus-
tomer satisfaction, and Net Promoter Score, if available, should also be
combined to provide a comprehensive composite of customer contact per-
formance and potential.
Selecting messages from segmentation to monetization
to syndication
Geographic Segmentation
“Dear Neighbor, the season is changing, it’s time to . . .” Geographic
segmentation broadcasts a single message to a geographic area, such
as a country, region, state, or zip code. The container and its messages
are the same for everyone in that geographic segment. This is used
for high volume broad awareness campaigns and typically costs less
per customer, although the overall expense can be higher due to the
breadth of market coverage.
Demographic segmentation
“Dear Head of Household/New Homeowner . . .” Demographic segmenta-
tion typically uses personal information or regionally specific informa-
tion to target customer messages. For example, if you want to reach
highly affluent individuals you may send letters or buy names and
phone numbers for residents of Park Avenue in New York City or all
households in California zip codes where the average new home price
is greater than $2 million.
“Congratulations on being in business for 5 years!” Business demo-
graphics are used to target businesses. Typically, marketers use indus-
try type, Standards Industrial Classification Code (SIC Code), annual
revenue, years in business, number of employees, and headquarters/
branch locations.

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Segmentation applications
Generally, 10 to 60 demographic variables are available to be used to
select customers or append data to customer records. Appending data
enables creative marketers to construct messages that more closely
match a customer’s ability to buy and buying preferences.
Targeted program execution
Marketing analysts also combine demographic variables to create more
refined target groups, such as homeowners who purchased a house
in the last 90 days and who also have one elementary school–aged
child.
Behavioral Message Segmentation
“Dear Customer, about your purchase . . .” Behavioral segmentation uses
information captured from prior customer contacts. Contacts may
include purchases, website visits, phone inquiries, event registrations,
general interest forms, service calls, upgrades, and other company or
partner company contacts.
Behavioral information provides marketers with insights into the
customer’s interests, such as how, when, where, through which chan-
nel, and how often the customer contacts the company.
Armed with this information, creative marketers craft messages
that align with customer interests and channel preferences.
Personalization
“Dear Miguel . . .” Personalization uses information from all available
resources to craft a contact that strives to speak directly to a custom-
er’s needs, preferences, and circumstances, as if face-to-face. Some
aspects of personalization that distinguish it from other forms of
message targeting are the use of a customer’s nickname, referencing
current services, recent service and product use, or reference to other
open issues that the customer is experiencing, such as abnormally

high frequency of calls or weather. Personalization requires your com-
pany to factor customer preferences into each contact and product
use, such as offering process shortcuts for customers that have called
before, registered before, or made identical purchases.
Personalization has evolved beyond putting the customer’s name
on an envelope, or greeting him by first name on the phone or nick-
name in an email, to include customer-specific contact, delivery, and
assembly rules. Customers require companies to blend their best
practices with prior customers with their own preferences and cir-
cumstances to ensure the best, most convenient, most productive,
problem-free experience. Firms that fail to leverage customer infor-
mation to personalize contacts and services will lose business and
profit margin to companies that deliver greater perceived value to each
customer based on the customer’s defined terms.
Predictive Model Messaging
“Dear Miguel, a special offer just for you . . . ” Predictive targeted mes-
sages use the results of the company’s past contacts, combined with
the customer’s profile data, to predict what, when, and how much a
customer is likely to buy. Predictive message targeting extends beyond
who is likely to purchase a product and can be used to prompt mes-
sages to every customer contact point.
You can predict who will and will not buy which products at what
price. You can also predict which customers are more likely to open an
email, answer a phone, return a product, or buy a product. Additionally,
you can predict which customers are least likely to pay for a product
or pay full price and which ones are most likely to complain.
Your ability to predict how customers will respond contact-by-
contact is dependent upon the amount of historic and ongoing activ-
ity data the company is able to capture. It also depends upon your
company’s modeling sophistication and messaging delivery system.
Your ability to act on its predictive modeling findings requires exec-

100 customer worthy
utive management commitment and sponsorship. It requires flexible
and adaptive customer contact and operations systems, end-to-end
customer demand-to-fulfillment-to-service chain visibility, and con-
tact access points for execution.
Examples of ways to embed predictive models into core operations
include:
Web pages that use collaborative filtering to assemble mes-
sages.
Call centers that queue and route calls to specially skilled
agents, then prompt telemarketing scripts that dynamically
change offers.
Pick, pack, and ship automated packing systems that use
business rules to insert various sales materials, product
samples, and labels in distribution.
Commercialization
“Your message here . . . ” In addition to segmenting messages for your
own products and services, your company can sell your message slots
to third parties. An offer for a barbecue grill might fall out of a monthly
billing statement, or an offer for a magazine subscription or sweep-
stakes entry might come at the end of a customer service call.
You can commercialize a slot as easily as charging a third party
for the privilege of putting a label on a box containing an advertising
message. Here is an example: “Got Milk?” stickers on oranges or “Got
Oranges?” stickers on milk cartons.
The concept of commercialization is an excellent way to grasp mon-
etizing each contact’s message slots. Ask, “Who would place a mes-
sage here and for how much?” Exposing all of your contacts and slots
and examining the current slot allocation, used and unused, is the
catalyst for discussion among employees regarding valuing slots and
contacts based on internally competing departments, products, and
messages. Multi-product companies can choose to feature another
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division’s products in their messages and charge the internal client for
the opportunity. Likewise, you should identify which business partners
may want to pay for the privilege of featuring their messages in an
available slot and how much they would pay.
Affiliation
“Customers like you also like . . . ” Affiliation message targeting takes
commercialization to another level to blend two or more brands. It also
links some back-end operations to create a seamless and continuous
customer experience. Some commonplace examples of affiliate mes-
sage delivery include payment options at a store or checkout page
on a website, delivery options where the customer can select from a
number of carriers at various price points, or cell phone replacement
insurance options at contact signing. All of these services are provided
by third parties but embedded in the core offering to be both conve-
nient and transparent to the end customer.
The affiliate message delivery model is typically priced and man-
aged as a gain-share model where parties agree on specific shared
service, resource, integration, and process responsibilities. Both par-
ties share in the revenue or profit generated from the success of the
messages.
Syndication
“What would Google do?” Syndication is the most advanced form of
message targeting. You can expose a message slot to a group of com-
panies, stakeholders, or the open market in order for all parties to bid
for the right to place their message in the slot.
The syndication model is most familiar in the online media market
and web channels where message slots alongside news and informa-
tion content are sold to the highest bidder.
Constantly updated through testing, web page technologies swap
ads through a network of buyers and sellers at an enormous rate and

102 customer worthy
with speed, flexibility, and tracking. As a result, companies have much
more information on existing, registered, and repeat customers, along
with the power of their brand and the equity built in their relationship
(trust like Amazon, brand affiliation like Tiffany, American Express,
Bank of America, or Goldman Sachs).
As you begin to realize the breadth and potential value of your
contact network, and as messages continue to become digitized and
network connected, more of them will be shared among businesses
delivering complimentary and opportunistic products and services.

103
Chapter 8
The Customer Schematic
CxC Matrix DIY* (Do It Yourself)
You should be able to complete your own customer, department, and sys-
tems Matrix with the complete set of customer stages and channel catego-
ries in a short time, measured in hours rather than days and weeks. With a
top level Matrix filled in, selected areas can be completed with greater detail
based on your company’s objectives.
*Caution: Use only enough detail to achieve an objective.
The Matrix diagram depicts your business’s current customer infra-
structure, along with the people, systems, and departments responsible for
customer-facing operations, as well as all non-customer-facing operations
responsible for designing, building, delivering, pricing, promoting, and sup-
porting your company’s products and services.
Five quick steps to building your company’s CxC Matrix
Visualize: Inventory all customer contact points and respective systems.
Analyze: Count customers and observe customer flow.
Monetize: Assign dollar value to each customer.
Prioritize: Target focus areas based on strategic value, monetized opportuni-
ties, and risks.
Optimize: Set and monitor goals per contact point; allocate investments
to best performing tactics and treatments; continuously improve
process-based performance,

104 customer worthy
CxC Matrix development tips
You need to establish your own channel categories and stages in the con-
sumer cycle. Modify the templates provided in this book to use terms familiar
to your industry and, specifically, to your company (template downloads are
available at www.CustomerWorthy.com).
Channel categories are most important for strategy, market assess-
ment, and planning, while individual contact channel assignment is
critical for financial analysis and contact design. As you insert more
detail beneath the channel category level, the Matrix becomes more
valuable as a tool for specific functions, activities, and tactics. Details
relating to systems and functionality help business units and infor-
mation technology departments engage in a dialog about needs,
requirements, and technical specifications. Details regarding media,
containers, slots, and messages provide a platform for describing
and managing the dialog in each customer contact. Activity costs
and projected revenue details are important for finance planning and
department managers. Later chapters will provide more information
for each department or function.
What is most important is that each channel and contact be listed only
once in the Matrix to maintain the mutual exclusivity of the channel and
stage cells.
Step 1. Visualize—
Inventory All Customer Contact Points and Respective Systems
When introducing the preliminary Matrix concepts, it is best to start with
broad categories of customer contact channels using familiar terms that
your employees recognize such as inbound phone, outbound phone, cus-
tomer support, infield sales, office locations, partner resellers, direct mail,
geographies (i.e., markets, territories, regions).

8: The Customer Schematic 105
It is also best to start with the most familiar and obvious channels
grouped by categories and then insert major missing channel categories.
For example, your company may not use resellers or partners to distribute
your product, but you should list third parties as a channel category because
your customers are likely to try to fulfill their needs in all channels. A large
number of customers may search for your products and services in chan-
nels that your company is not using or where you are under-represented
and under-invested.
It is important to address Matrix stages discreetly by interaction channel,
as customers have different expectations based on channel.
However, it isn’t necessary to complete the entire grid. You may not take
orders online, or you may provide a service that you do not believe can be
categorized as “accepted” or “delivered.” These types of adjustments are not
required at this level of analysis.
Quick Picture: For a strategic review and to quickly kick off the “Think
Like a Customer” discussion:
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.Community
Geography
Digital
Location
Third party
One-on-one
Community

106 customer worthy
Step 2. Analyze—
Count Customers and Observe Customer Flow
Put your customers in the Matrix, and examine customer flow and bottlenecks.
Identify how many unique customers exist at each contact point or cell for a
specific unit of time. These numbers do not have to be precise. Best guesses
work fine in order to expedite the next level of findings.
Establish a timeframe for collecting customer count data, as different
systems and business types have varying data capture and access capabili-
ties. It is best to start with annual customer counts per contact and stage
since annual counts should be the easiest and fastest to collect. Where
available, monthly counts should be a near-term goal as month-to-month
data reflects customer flow performance.
Get the Easiest Data Using the Quickest Means
Managers should not get bogged down at this stage with an exact number of
customers, nor should they be concerned with anonymous versus identified
customers just yet. Anonymous customers are those with contacts that do
not require identification or recognition, such as a website visit, a call into a
call center, or a visit to a store. Estimates for total number of customers per
contact channel and stage should be completed as quickly as possible.
Each channel is supported by a corresponding system. For example, boxes
filled in the warehouse should be classified as “8. Delivery” stage under
the “one-on-one” channel. Fill in the number of customers who were sent
shipments on a monthly basis. Here are some examples of quick counts by
channel, by stage: How many website visits, incoming service calls, partner
sales calls, web mentions, newspaper mentions, returned items, in-field
sales calls?
This simple analysis exposes strategic questions regarding the use of
entire channels such as Internet, third parties, or direct sales, while typically
uncovering bottlenecks in customer demand processes and customer service
capabilities or resources.

Analyze Deliverables
Metrics, performance benchmarks
Return on investment (ROI) scenario framework and components
“What if” system and process design scenario framework
CxC Matrix goal setting and coaching framework
Strategic SWAT (Strength, Weakness, Actions, Tactics) analysis
framework
Preliminary integration or overlay with other management perfor-
mance frameworks, metrics, and methods
Other Matrix Contact Point Analysis Areas
Define nature of the intra-process links.
Audit each contact’s function and capabilities. Develop an under-
standing of the capacities and time lags associated with each busi-
ness process.
Sample Questions and Observations:
Look at the total numbers at the bottom of each column. Col-
umns 1-8 depict the conversion rate from life stage to life stage
which, when combined with monetization, can be used to quan-
tify the value of any resource investment.
For each high potential channel, look further at the channel
details, and discuss opportunities and risks associated with
making changes by channel, by consumer cycle.
This Matrix should provide a quick quantifiable view of multi-
channel customer behavior. While this is a macro view of
performance across stages, management should discuss the
interrelationship of web to location customers, third party to
web to location customers, etc., and the existing contact net-
work’s fitness and ability to meet customer needs. Do the cur-
rent structures and resources meet evolving customer needs?
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2.
3.
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108 customer worthy
Highlight the experience stages by channel that are most critical
to your business success over the next 6-12 months.
95%: The percentage of retail companies that think it’s valuable to use data
to project customer lifetime value.
35%: The percentage that actually do it.
—Retail Systems Research, Benchmark Study, July 2007
Step 3. Monetize—
Assign Dollar Value to Each Customer
Insert estimated annual revenue per customer. Multiply the value per cus-
tomer times the number of customers in each cell. Summarize the stage
numbers in each column.
Note on Double-Counting: At this point, the raw numbers summed in
each column represent double and triple-counted customers, as most
companies cannot discreetly track individual customers from channel
to channel, contact to contact, and stage to stage in the consumer
cycle. While getting to the point that individuals are distinguishable
in each cell is an excellent long-term goal, precision down to the cus-
tomer level is not necessary now.
Lifetime Value or Annual Revenue per Customer
How much is each customer worth over his entire relationship? If you do not
have a lifetime value figure, or lifetime value is considered unreliable, use
annual revenue per customer to assess the potential value of each cell. For
most companies, it is worthwhile to use annual revenue per customer or per
product line to illustrate and visualize value pockets. Another monetization
alternative is to create a separate Matrix using each department’s customer
value number and for your entire company to come to an agreement on
which number fits best.
•

Managers can now quickly rank the areas that represent the great-
est opportunity for revenue enhancement and cost reduction by placing
monetary values at each channel, customer stage, and contact. Simply put:
“How many customers will be affected with what revenue gain or cost reduc-
tion?”
If your company is a multi-line business that markets to a diverse cus-
tomer population across countries and markets, you may want to complete
CxC Matrices for each logical division of your business.
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.Community
Geography
Digital
Location
Third party
One-on-one
Community
Monthly flow
∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂∂Opportunity $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $ $
Step 4. Prioritize—
Target Areas Based on Their Strategic Value, Monetized Opportunities,
and Risks
Target the Matrix contact points that have the greatest strategic and mon-
etary importance. Use the Matrix to connect contact points and activities
to specific corporate objectives. Then, complete the Matrix to include goals,
10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10% 10%

110 customer worthy
actions, owners, and systems to ensure execution excellence.
Prioritize areas with the greatest benefit:
Most vulnerable—cost leakage, competitive threats, market mis-
alignment
Opportunistic—high growth, quick, simple changes required
Competitive threat assessment—channel coverage, service con-
figurations, service quality, sophistication, perceived preferential
value margin assessment
Enormous opportunity—land grab, strategic opportunity design,
test market simulations, new market entry, merger, acquisition,
expansion, and consolidation scenarios
The Hot Spot Method—CxC Matrix hot spots: biggest gains and
biggest costs cells direct focus to areas for immediate perfor-
mance lifts
Focus on one area at a time, and complete the Matrix details for each
target contact point. Realize that contacts are related via customer path
and internally shared systems and processes, which may require bridging
resources and joint department planning.
Step 5. Optimize—
Set and Monitor Goals per Contact Point
At this point, the Matrix provides a static view of a company’s business,
depicting how many customers contact the company, its brand, its products,
partners, and messages across each channel and at each stage on a periodic
basis—monthly or annually.
You should be able to get to this step and have a CxC Matrix view of
your business in 1 to 12 weeks.
You derive tremendous value and uncover “quick wins” (high return on
investment with a short payback window and little to no capital expenditures
or out-of-pocket costs) just from the discussions, departmental exchanges
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and discoveries that take place while building this static, point-in-time cus-
tomer view.
However, you should not lose sight of the ultimate goal of building a cus-
tomer worthy mindset among managers. The CxC Matrix provides a system
of sensors across your entire customer contact network to help you imme-
diately and knowledgeably execute every customer contact optimally.
Flow: The Challenge
Customer flow to revenue stages (Stages 1–6) and through cost stages (7–15)
is the single metric that every manager should monitor. Answer these simple
questions:
At what rate are new customers appearing?
At what rate are customers buying?
At what rate are customers repeat buying?
At what rate do customers require service and care?
These simple questions require managers to track the length of time
customers spend at each stage and specific customer movement from stage
to stage and channel to channel. Again, not all channels and stages need to
be completely transparent and accessible on day one, but those channels
and contact areas deemed critical in the earlier stages should be closely
monitored as soon as possible.
In summary, set performance goals by department and contact owner
that are visible across the company. Use existing measurement and reporting
systems to report on customer performance by channel and stage, making
every effort to integrate with current performance measures.
CxC Matrix Reporting—Alerts and Alarms
Your reporting should be set up to alert management to anomalies. For
example:
A spike in customers requesting information.
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112 customer worthy
A drop-off in website customers buying (moving from Stage 5 to Stage 6).
An increase in time for all customers moving from Stage 2 to Stage 6.
Each of these, detected by alarms set off by changes in benchmark perfor-
mance, are indications of business risk or opportunity.These changes may be
due to obvious activities, such as a new advertising program or a mention of
a product on a national news broadcast. Or they may be due to less obvious
activities or market events like a competitor’s new product launch or price
change, bad weather during a peak sale weekend, or inventory outages at
a primary distribution point. Transparency to changes in customer flow pro-
vides early warnings to downstream managers, finance, executive manage-
ment, and shareholders.This is important because changes in customer flow
directly affect revenue, costs, and income.
Continuously encourage employees to innovate and contribute customer
growth and cost containment suggestions. Establish recognition and reward
systems based on customer performance for every department tied to and
directly traceable to customer performance observable in the CxC Matrix.
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113
Chapter 9
The Customer’s Network
Count the contacts
Jose heads to lunch at the Panera across the highway from his office. While
he is deciding between six types of bread and 30 combinations of top-
pings for his ham and cheese sandwich, the lunch shop’s 42-inch flat screen
plays a series of in-house commercials to the right of the large illuminated
menu board. Above and left, another screen tuned to CNN features a doc-
tor being interviewed about eating a healthy diet, followed by a Subway
commercial.
Seemingly oblivious to all of this chatter, Jose is now fourth in line to
order but becomes distracted by his Google phone vibrating in his pocket.
He checks the “alert” to see who is trying to reach him and sees an email
message from online electronics retailer Tiger Direct announcing a “three-
hour sale on 26-inch combination personal computer and high-definition
digital television monitors for $99.”
Still waiting in line, Jose clicks the link to the Tiger Direct website on his
phone, and after three more clicks, he has logged in to his corporate Tiger
Direct account. He changes the quantity on the pre-completed order page to
“6” and clicks “submit” to complete his order. His three-inch phone screen
displays “order completed” along with a confirmation code and a shipment
notification message verifying that the monitors will arrive at his office in
two days.
Jose looks up at the cashier and orders his sandwich, adding a cinnamon
roll as a reward for saving his company more than $400. He deserves it. Four
minutes later, he leaves the store with his lunch and passes a big brand
electronics retailer advertising a “just reduced 22-inch monitor for $209”

114 customer worthy
with the notation, “only 3 left.” Jose shakes his head and murmurs quietly,
“They just don’t get it.”
The bottom line is that customers have figured out the system, and they
are motivated by price, urgency, quality, trust, and ease of doing business.
The customer’s network
Tiger Direct participates in Jose’s network. The customer, Jose, gladly lets
Tiger Direct interrupt his personal lunch hour not just to offer him something
free, but also to sell him something.
Jose designs his network to carefully meet his needs by selecting who
has access to his email accounts, phone numbers, addresses, and devices.
His criteria are personal, and they change as his needs change. He chooses
some for convenience and others out of necessity, like his bank accounts
and credit cards. He chooses still others for curiosity and entertainment.
But, most importantly, Jose is in control of who is “in” and who is “out,”
the times of day that he is open to messages, and the types and frequency
of the messages, offers, updates, and alerts.
In the customer’s network—phone, email, car, game device, television—
information moves from one device to another according to the customer’s
preferences. The customers use “rules” to orchestrate information around
their network.
Thanks to pervasive access to the Internet and the reach of handheld
computer and communication devices, customers blur the division between
personal life and work life, personal time and work time. This also changes
customer perceptions and expectations for how things should operate
regarding business dialogue, information access, process portability and
mobility, feedback, and assistance at each contact.
Your customers are on duty nearly 24 ⁄7, armed with Blackberries,
iPhones, other smart phones, and tablet and ultraportable data retrieving
and communication devices. Your customer’s network transcends the tra-
ditional barriers of work time, personal time, and leisure time, creating a

9: The Customer’s Network 115
digital composite persona that persists across devices, websites, calendars,
channels, locations, activities, transactions, and messages.
Companies must learn to“Think Like a Customer!”
“We don’t decide how long the people are in the store. What we decide
is how easy it is for you within the 21 minutes you’ve allocated to get what
you want.”
— Stephen Quinn, Walmart Marketing Chief
The hyper-aware customer knows more about your company, your product,
and your service than any individual he is likely to come into contact with
during the entire buying process.
Customers have breached the wall at most companies. Information
is everywhere: embedded customers, embedded analysts, and embedded
competitors. Review sites are springing up, submitting unsolicited reviews
of your products and services at a host of websites. People blog, instant
message, Tweet, broadcast, and narrowcast about how wonderful or how
horrible you are.
Digitization Enables Transparency
Past, current, and potential customers, as well as competitors, partners, and
employees participate in message networks and communities that share
information about your business. All parties freely discuss pricing, quality,
activities, affiliations, upcoming developments, customer satisfaction, cor-
porate shenanigans—just about everything.
If someone wants to find out more information that isn’t currently avail-
able, he can simply go to a post, build his own blog, or go to an industry
website. He can submit a question or opinion to a bulletin board and wait
for commentary to come back. To add to management’s frustration, most

116 customer worthy
of the information is exchanged anonymously without any way of verifying
or tracking who leaked what or who made up the story.
Again, the Internet and the age of digitalization have changed the cor-
porate information landscape forever. A company’s operations, lawsuits,
and board member activities—significant or insignificant, real or unreal—are
equally searchable and accessible to anyone with an interest.
In order to compete, your company must seek an invitation to your
customer networks. You may become the source and destination for all
related information, or you may link customers to the most convenient
source. If you cannot be the source, find a way to get on customer maps
and radar, even if it means participating in commentary and services not
specifically related to your product or service. Provide a means to get cus-
tomers what they need. This is how you create repeat business and the
eventual revenue payoff.
The answer is in the Matrix
Do not make the mistake of assuming that customers know how to design
products. They don’t. But observing how customers get, find, use, and link
your service to their needs will uncover areas where your business can create
innovative products, services, features, and partnerships.
The Next Big Thing
The next great breakthrough will not be a brand new service. It will be a
combination of products, services, features, and functions that closely wrap
themselves around the customer’s need-set and adapt to the customer’s life
stage. An example might be a bundle of financial services that adapt to a
customer’s age, family attributes, transaction behavior, and season using
best practices for balancing savings, spending, investing, and insurance. The
Matrix enables customers to benefit from this information that is automati-
cally built in to their service and applied to their specific situation.

The customer is the true arbiter of good corporate decisions
Try to think like a customer. Your customers make the same cost or expense-
based decisions as your company. So, every “go forward” decision in the CxC
Matrix process involves a minimum of two parties balancing trade-offs and
exchanging value.
Consumers weigh value based on their own value sets. Convenience,
proximity, brand, product fit, total cost of ownership, and quality of service
are estimated by the shopper who builds a checklist that establishes a set
of expectations for vendors, sellers, and servicers. Shoppers and customers
have become more aware of their purchase options, so they leverage the
Matrix process transparency to negotiate demands at every stage.
Buyers and sellers knowingly monitor their investment and expenses
throughout the buying process, weighing trade-offs at each stage:
“Buy now or delay?”
“Customize product and wait or take available product
immediately?”
“Use vendor’s financing or alternative funding sources?”
“Buy or lease?”
All parties involved in the customer experience process have a vested
interest in each contact. What has changed is that, up until now, companies
have only looked at their internal expenses where they have some degree of
control. Now, companies are forced to acknowledge the customer’s invest-
ment and stated or implied specifications and requirements. Perhaps even
more troublesome is the fact that this entire experience may be observed,
critiqued, mocked, or mimicked in the transparent marketplace where service
contacts are recorded and exposed on websites and forums like YouTube,
Facebook, Twitter, and CNet.
However, there is a great opportunity in all of this. By understanding and
addressing the customer’s expectations and expenses in every contact, you
can expose greater revenue and cost savings opportunities for both parties.
These opportunities exist in nearly every customer interaction and contact,
•
•
•
•

118 customer worthy
whether the contact is person-to-person, or person-to-machine. It happens
during the purchasing cycle, the buying transaction, and in each stage of
the customer experience.
“BlueLight spokesman Dave Karraker said the slowdowns on his company’s
site were caused in part because of customers who were using shopping
bots to find PlayStation 2 game consoles. In recent days, BlueLight has been
able to redirect traffic from those bots, and sales have been increasing 5 per-
cent per day, Karraker said.”
—“E-tail Sites Resilient Amid Latest Holiday Hubbub,”
Troy Wolverton, CNET News
The rise of the professional customer
Customers get it. Not only have they mastered how to buy from you and
are likely to share this knowledge, but many buyers are also becoming sell-
ers in secondary markets. And if they are not selling your products and
services, they are still likely to influence the market at review sites, blogs,
and industry forums.
If you have not done so already, log onto the websites on the following
list, and enter your company name and one of your specific product names.
Even try one of your own product identification codes, and see what pops
up. Many managers are surprised to see that their products and services are
posted on other sites for resale. Products and services are typically sold as
after-market items in used or repaired condition or they are rebranded.
eBay
Craigslist
Amazon
Google
•
•
•
•

Managers should walk through the entire customer experience provided
by these sites to get a customer’s view of what he finds as he researches
your products, services, and company.
Do not betray trust—build value!
What if my car sent a message to a service station that I needed oil, and
the car negotiated the price along my daily route? Why not have a program
that optimizes prices for my commonly purchased items along my regular
commuting route? But let’s not stop there! Why not have a “buy” button that
assembles purchased products without my having to stop, so I only have to
pick them up later from a single location on my return trip. This implies a
great level of mutual trust between buyers and sellers, but similar models
exist where customers have professional buyers, use concierge services, and
buy through aggregators like Amazon. With a growing level of distrust of
companies that handle our personal data, new service configurations are
likely to evolve that balance privacy and convenience to benefit both the
company and the customer.
“Give trust, and you’ll get it double in return.”
—Kees Kamies, production manager in a facility that employed
socially and mentally disabled persons

120
Chapter 10
Start the Revolution
The revolution begins the next time your customer is on hold—when his
time and patience starts to waste away and he begins to speculate, “There
must be a better way.”
The revolution starts when your customer listens to the unintelligible
voice mail that your company left. It starts when someone at your company
defers a decision for a customer. Your customers may jot a note on a blog
or a forum. They may Tweet on Twitter or tag comments on another social
networking website. They may even start a free website or turn on their web
cam to record their idle thoughts and vent.
“Casey Neistat, 24, is one consumer who took his case to cyberspace when
his iPod died in September 2003 and he discovered Apple didn’t offer a re-
placement battery. “They suggested I buy a new iPod,” Neistat says. Instead,
he and brother Van Neistat, 29—both professional filmmakers—made a
short video including Casey’s phone conversation with an Apple customer
service representative.They posted it at iPodsdirtysecret.com and emailed 40
friends about the site, which has now received more than 1.5 million hits.“We
had no idea [the site] would get the attention it did,” Casey says. (Apple, by
the way, now has a battery replacement program for the iPod). All the rage:
angry consumers are using the Internet to get revenge. How can you keep
them happy?”
—Chris Penttila in Entrepreneur

10: Start the Revolution 121
While he is online, on hold, or waiting for the technician to arrive, there
are communities of other customers like him online, on hold, idly waiting,
and at some stage of frustration. The issue for you is how to make the
best use of the customers’ time or how to create some equitable system
for compensating customers for their time and effort invested. What are
the options? Reschedule? Make an offer to credit $5 if you call back again
in two hours? Offer an MP3 ringtone (yes, introduce a new service), offer a
gift card from a partner company? Apologize?
The bottom line? An idle customer is a dangerous customer.
It is customer payback time!
Figure 10.1
It’s time for businesses to compensate customers for the time they waste.
CustomerPayback monetizes customer relationships from the custom-
er’s perspective. A customer simply enters the business name, the amount
of his time wasted, and a fair customer wage per hour at CustomerPayback.
Customers may choose to provide more details about their grievances, the
company’s errors, additional damages, suggested solutions, and tips for
other customers to avoid problems. CustomerPayback’s ultimate goal is
customer experience improvement.
The site calculates the dollar equivalent of the time the customer invested
in the company and creates a receipt. This receipt is then sent to the offend-

122 customer worthy
ing company and recorded and reported in the CustomerPayback website.
Monetizing the customer time that companies waste should bring atten-
tion to the greatest business offenders, while also providing a means for cus-
tomers to suggest to companies how they can improve their processes.
CustomerPayback creates a dialogue between customers and businesses
in order to help companies like yours resolve systemic problems and identify,
monetize, analyze, and repair customer complaints as a result of broken
customer processes.
The site also highlights worst offending companies, as well as featur-
ing news about companies that are rectifying issues and making customer
time a priority.
CustomerPayback recommends that your business respond to customer
complaints and solution suggestions, which should also help you meet some
of the service shortfalls listed in the National Customer Rage Study. Note that
five of the top six “remedies” are non-monetary in nature:
An explanation of why the problem occurred (69%)
Assurance the problem would not be repeated (69%)
Product/service fixed (67%).
A “thank you for my business” (67%)
An apology (54%)
Opportunity to vent (54%)
Money back (43%)
Free product/service in the future (35%)
Compensation for lost time/inconvenience (22%)
Revenge (12%)
Source: Used with permission from CCA Office of the Ombudsman, 2005 National Customer Rage
Study, www.ombudsman.ed.gov, fsaombudsmanoffice@ed.gov, Editor, Mike Turpenoff.
The Customer Rage Study brings something else to the attention of man-
agers and customers. Most of us would agree that we are most frustrated
when companies disregard and under-appreciate our time. The Rage study
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.

reported that customers listed their most common “damages suffered” as
“loss of time” and “loss of money.”
CustomerPayback maintains a database by company of the amount of
hours and dollars each company owes its customers. This site also encour-
ages businesses to contact customers directly, offer coupons, cash, chari-
table donations, or some form of community service to help mend their
customer relationships.
More confessions (continued from the Preface)
Confession 2: I have been on both sides of every contact intersection
in the CxC Matrix. I have been to the other side. I have worked in the
multi-thousand cube call centers where hard-working, dedicated cus-
tomer service representatives show up every day, 24 hours a day to
answer calls, online chats, emails, and letters from angry, frustrated,
and generally unhappy customers. They handle problems that they had
no part in causing for companies they don’t directly work for.
I worked at Macy’s in the mall the day after Christmas, where I greeted
customers who arrived extra early to wait in long lines in order to argue the
“refund price without a receipt policy.” (Yes, that was me who caught the
sweater and box thrown by the person fourth in line from the register as she
shouted, “*$#/¢! you and *$#/¢! Macy’s!” And thank yous to all of the people
in line who apologized for the enraged customer and cheered as she left).
I have walked through the warehouses and shipping rooms where mil-
lions of letters and boxes are stuffed, labeled, and sent to your door. Like-
wise, I have spent time in the returns room where defective, mislabeled, and
returned items appear by the truckload.
Confession 3: I am a salesperson, and I believe that in this new age
where businesses and customers are so tightly connected we are all
in sales.
I have written advertisements for radio, television, direct mail, web-
sites, point of purchase, and billboards designed to intentionally and

124 customer worthy
measurably raise customer expectations and make splendid promises
enticing customers to “act now!”
Confession 4: I handled your data—without malfeasance—to help com-
panies build better solutions for you and to gain better understand-
ing of your needs and interests while trying to extract your optimum
potential revenue.
Confession 5: I don’t mind being on hold. Make “hold time” informa-
tional and/or entertaining.
There is a better way, and it is not that hard
Customer satisfaction scores do not need to continue to decline. Your tech-
nology, marketing and cost of sale do not need to escalate to chase every
possible deal and one-up your competitor in every channel in every contact.
This book is intended to help you avoid these kinds of problems by aligning
your company’s business objectives with its customer’s interests, values,
and expectations, making every contact customer worthy. Its goal is to help
you improve relationships with customers by not wasting customer time,
money, or attention. It is designed to simply make it more pleasurable to
do business with you.
You should be angry, too
We are all customers at work, at home, in restaurants, on vacation, while
grocery shopping, surfing the web, at the DMV, while filing our taxes, and
so on. This is why this customer worthiness is so important. We are all
victims of the same unsatisfactory customer experiences, and each of us
holds part of the solution.
The Customer Worthy MBA
You should traverse your own company’s CxC Matrix and have every manager
in your company do the same. You should go through the same process at

your major competitors to get your competitors’ customer expe-
rience. At a minimum, this should be performed on an annual
basis and should also be conducted any time there is a major
market or competitor shift, merger, major event in your industry,
new product launch, or news event.
25 Customer experiences to make you a better manager
For each of these experiences, keep a journal, taking notes about every
contact, stage, and channel.
Send a letter to your bank asking for an explanation of the interest
calculation on your money market checking account. Ask, “How
much will $10,000 be worth after two years?” Send an email asking
the same question.
Send a letter, email, and phone your wireless provider asking how
to lower your monthly bill and get better service.
Write a letter to your energy company (gas or electricity) asking it
to please lower your monthly bill.
Send flowers to yourself from 1-800-flowers.com and FTD.com. Note
the differences in each stage in each channel using the Matrix.
Subscribe to WineLibrary. Buy two bottles, and return one. (Enjoy
the other.)
Write and submit a product review on Amazon.
Join LinkedIn, and write a recommendation for 2 coworkers.
Open a Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and Google account. Then can-
cel each account.
Go on a car scavenger hunt, shopping at: Mercedes, Lexus, Mini Coo-
per, Ford, Cars.com, and Edmunds. First, shop online for a vehicle
in the same size and color as what you currently drive. Then, visit
each dealership, take a test drive, and get the lowest price.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
For a blank, full-size
printable pdf version of
the CxC Matrix go to:
www.customerworthy.com

126 customer worthy
Shop for a copy of Microsoft Office software online, and try to
get the best price and the shortest delivery time. Bonus points for
using online chat. Note the delivery cost, shipping cost, taxes, and
version variations.
Visit, register, and join Gevalia Coffee Club. After you get the free
coffee stuff, quit, and keep track of your email and mail offers/
follow-up. Try to do the same thing at Starbucks online.
Sell something on eBay, buy something on eBay, and bid for some-
thing and win it on eBay.
Set up and use Google Adwords for two months.
Make and post a YouTube video. Send the link to three people you
know.
Become a Microsoft partner. Complete the form at https://partner.
microsoft.com.
Become a Salesforce Partner at https://www.salesforce.com/part-
ners/apply-partners.jsp.
Become an Oracle Partner at http://www.oracle.com/index.html.
Become a WebTrends Reseller at https://www.webtrends.com/Part-
ners/AuthorizedResellers/ResellerApplication.aspx.
Host a gathering for people you don’t know using LinkedIn
and/or a temporary Google website. Offer to buy appetizers
for the event, come up with a subject, follow up with a thank
you, post pictures and video on Facebook and YouTube, and link to
your invite web page.
Go to your local Department of Motor Vehicles for one hour when
they open. Then, go to the local library and Starbucks. Then, return
to the DMV.
Sponsor a child at WorldVision.
Shop for a trip to Orlando using Travelocity, Priceline (name your
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.

own price—$25, really!), Hotels.com, HomeAway, Expedia, and
VRBO.
Then, go to Orlando and visit Disney World, Universal Studios, Sea
World, and Gator World. For a bonus, take someone in a wheelchair
to add perspective.
Spend eight hours shopping on New York’s Fifth Avenue, three
hours in the Short Hills Mall in Short Hills, New Jersey, 30 minutes
at Costco, 30 minutes at Walmart, 30 minutes at Petco, and 30
minutes at Staples. Join the loyalty program for each one online
after your visit.
Write a press release, and post it at www.openpr.com/news/submit.
html or some other free press release website.
23.
24.
25.

128
Chapter 11
Customer Privacy Is Nothing to Kid About
Satellites watch your house, your office, and your children’s school. Traffic
cameras follow your daily commute turn by turn. Software watches where
you surf on the web, tracks your eyeball’s movement across pages, and
calculates each click, pause, and impulse. This software predicts where you
will go next and guesses your interests by popping up images and offers to
tempt you to act now.
“New gadgets installed in cars will be able to tell insurers how many miles
drivers have logged, what times of the day they drive, and even how fre-
quently they abruptly stop and start. Other incarnations of the technology
involve GPS devices that can even tell insurers precisely where drivers have
traveled, and if they obeyed local speed limits.”
—Red Tape Chronicles, http://redtape.cnbc.com
Even your car spies on you with its GPS (your phone may be an accom-
plice, too, as are other devices in your home and office). Your movements,
each tenth of a mile, are measured. In-car computers log each press on the
accelerator and brake, speed, and condition. E-ZPass, parking meters, gas
purchases with credit cards, and loyalty cards all generate mile markers
detailing your customer journey.
In the background and around the world, unbeknownst to you, third
parties harvest this information, enhancing it with the other information
they have gathered, modeled, and scored. Information about you is pack-
aged, and your digital persona is sold to the highest bidder. Worse yet, it
is sold as often as possible to anyone who will pay. Your information, your

11: Customer Privacy is Nothing to Kid About 129
interests, and where you spend your time is packaged and sold by local,
national, and global vendors.
So, what does this mean to business owners?
How much is my data worth anyway?
The two stories that follow shed some light on customer data breaches
and customer identity theft. The stories are not related and Story #1 is an
illustrative account told by security experts to depict standard operations
in identity theft rings. They highlight why companies of all sizes and across
all industries must require more stringent customer information handling
processes. The most shocking aspect of these stories, which are just two
among thousands, is how simple and easy it is for the thieves in each sce-
nario to steal customer data.
What the stories do not show, of course, is the pain, annoyance, time,
effort, and suffering that each of the customers went through to reverse the
transactions, adjust their accounts, and repair their credit. The total cost of
these crimes is many times what the thieves actually stole.
Story #1
June 24, 2008, Bangalore: Chandri receives a message back from “RBL
Ventures,” asking him to show them a sample of 100 transactions so
that they can evaluate the data. Four hours later, they email him back,
offering $12 per usable card. He emails half the data. RBL responds an
hour later, saying that there is usable data on 42,174 valid, separate
cards. They offer to pay him $506,088 for those cards and will wire
the funds to his bank account. He emails them his bank account
information.
June 24, 2008, Bucharest: Elescieu gets the first 50,000 credit card
transactions from “Reliable Supplier” and runs the numbers through
a program that spots duplicates and weeds out cards known to have
expired or been cancelled. He subtracts another 2,000 for good mea-
sure and offers $12 to a seller he thinks is inexperienced.

130 customer worthy
June 25, 2008, Bangalore: Having confirmed that the funds are in his
bank account, Chandri sends the other 500,000 transactions and gets
a wire transfer for $464,088 for 38,674 cards.
June 28, 2008, Bucharest: Elescieu takes the credit card data to an
associate who manufactures counterfeit credit cards.
July 12, 2008, Bangalore: Chandri buys a new car for cash, and takes
his family shopping. He invests the money in bank CDs.
July 14, 2008, Bucharest: Elescieu distributes the counterfeit cards to
a ring of associates who will use them quickly, primarily to buy high
ticket items that can be resold for cash. He gets a cut of the cash
they raise in return for his promise to provide more counterfeit cards
in the future.
July 28, 2008, Moultrie: Morgan gets her credit card statement in the
mail and finds $4,326 in charges for purchases of consumer electronics
and jewelry in several European cities. She immediately calls her credit
card issuer and reports the fraudulent transactions to a customer
service representative, who cancels the card and tells Morgan that
she need only pay for the purchases she made. Her new card will be
mailed to her in a few days.”
—Transaction Trends, December Data Security Investigations,
“Anatomy of Two Breach Scenarios with Two Very Different
Outcomes” by Richard H. Gamble, gamble10@earthlink.net
Story #2
“Illegitimate customers are placing orders for flowers using stolen
credit card information. The orders are typically placed via fax, email,
and/or hearing-impaired relay calls. The perpetrator then requests that
the florists wrap the flower arrangements in various amounts of cash
and bill the difference to the credit card number(s) provided. These
orders have been known to reach $4,000. A shipping address for the
order is then provided to the merchant.

In some instances, the perpetrators have been known to hire an
unsuspecting accomplice to pick up the flowers in person. This accom-
plice is then instructed to ship the flowers via UPS or the mail.
When the true cardholder receives the floral charge on their monthly
statement, they will initiate a chargeback, as the order was placed
without their authorization. As a result, the merchant will become
liable for the fraudulent sale.”
—“Visa Alerts of Floral Credit Card Fraud,”
www.merchantaccountalerts.com
The florist story above is especially galling since it appears that the
employees at the florist are going out of their way to meet a customer’s
needs by wrapping cash in the bouquet.
Missing pieces—just a calculable piece of the puzzle
Businesses have to think like a customer and be aware of how easily cus-
tomer data can be stolen, manipulated and fraudulently manufactured and
used. The CxC Matrix depicts how the missing pieces of a customer’s digital
mosaic are easily filled in using predictive models and algorithms. Simply
put, customers are not that unique. Consumption and purchase patterns,
delivery and payment preferences follow similar paths that make differenti-
ating real behaviors from manufactured or simulated behavior near impos-
sible to distinguish. As more channels become digitized and web connected,
customer activities will become even more transparent and more easily
simulated. More data constantly becomes available as digital television and
radio behavior is captured per click. Favorites on both are readily available.
As customers unknowingly link members of their households, their social
networks, their work relationships, digital identities will become more vul-
nerable to poaching, phishing, eavesdropping, fraud and theft.
So, what do your customers do? Stop using credit cards? Disconnect their
internet connections, GPS, satellite radio and cable television? Stop traveling

132 customer worthy
for business? Not likely. Yet, regardless of what they might think or how they
might try, customers are not that unique, and they likely make the majority
of their purchases locally within four miles or 15 minutes of their homes and
workplaces. The digital breadcrumbs from census data, surveys they com-
pleted, loan applications, health club and group membership applications,
health records, sweepstakes entries, or even pharmacist forms are just wait-
ing to be assembled with a high degree of accuracy—even if your customers
don’t approve or assist. Even a novice data assembler, identity hacker, can
match home and business addresses to demographics and publicly available
data and, like a video simulation game, begin playing out scenarios acting
like hundreds to thousands of individual consumers.
Electronic data is everywhere and growing
In case you think the news media or a couple of individuals are overreacting
to data theft and easy access to personal and confidential data, please go
through this quick exercise.
Step 1. Go online to www.Google.com.
Step 2. Type “Attendee List” in search window.
Step 3. Select “Advanced Search,” go to options under “File Type,” and
select “Microsoft Excel (.xls)”
Step 4. Click “Advanced Search” or hit “enter.”
Step 5. Take a look at the Excel files presented. No, don’t open them.
They are private information.
Step 6. Edit the search box by adding “Mike” to the front of the search
statement.
Step 7. Reexamine the files.
Hopefully, after a couple of people read this book, these files will become
harder to access and will be more protected. Just maybe, companies, indi-
viduals, churches, and membership organizations will protect information
more seriously.

Is this identity theft? This entire exercise takes about 90 seconds, and
if anyone has wised up to this application and no results appear, you can
spend another 90 seconds experimenting with words like “name,” “phone,”
“home,” “addr_2,” and other file types to see what pops up.
Get scared, exercise caution, and read your statements
You and your customers should be scared because customer data moves
around much too easily. Customer data is easily monetized and too lazily
shared.
A 16-gigabyte data storage card, the kind used in a camera, phone, or
GPS, is the size of a thumbnail and weighs half an ounce. It can hold the
name, address, phone number, email address, and information about every
individual in the United States or the name and address of everyone in China.
Sending that same amount of data as an email attachment takes less than
15 minutes on an easily available computer network.
Banking, health, credit card, and relationship data should not be directly
traceable to individuals, families, households, and companies. Businesses
and individuals exchange data too freely across unsecure networks, on pieces
of paper, in mail, on the phone, in emails, and in web order forms.
This is an unfortunate artifact of antiquated systems design. As data is
exchanged between companies, third parties, and outsourced service provid-
ers, the emphasis is on speed and efficient transaction processing. Individu-
als and customer data protection simply receives less attention.
Part of the issue is reliance on third parties for billing, collections, and
customer service. Information needs to be portable and complete to recon-
struct the customer situation. This is the only way to create situational
awareness for all of the parties serving the customer and performing trans-
actions and contacts on behalf of the company.
Information systems groups and technology companies have always
had a blind spot when it comes to customer data management. This fun-
damental flaw comes from an incomplete vision, a short-sightedness in

134 customer worthy
customer information design. The customer information is subservient to
the demands of the transaction, accounting, and financial systems. This is
why, to this day, it is so difficult to track all of the items in a customer order
and all of the contacts preceding and following a customer transaction.
Businesses race to get new customers and minimize the customer’s
inconvenience, asking for substantial amounts of information in the process
without even realizing it. As a result, customer information systems have
been patched together, often based on tricking customers into believing that
they are dealing with the same company or department. This is to promote
the illusion that the customer has not been handed off to another depart-
ment, another set of systems, or another company in another country. This
deception has built an information network that is itself easily deceived.
Your business should use the CxC Matrix as a tool to audit your personal
data protection policies and procedures at each contact point. The Matrix
can list what business and personal data is exchanged and available at each
contact point, what governance and safeguards exist at each point, whether
data is encrypted or which data elements are exposed and why, where third
party data usage agreements exist, and where data security and monitoring
procedures are in place for each system.
Your business is challenged with reducing the amount of time that cus-
tomers have to spend identifying themselves (authorizing transactions),
while, at the same time, assuring the security and authenticity of each
contact. In most instances, this identify requirement needs to take place
prior to the exchange of any information in any contact. This all takes place
before or simultaneously with preparing the contact point with the right
message, the right offer, and all of the message components to ensure an
optimum customer experience.
Businesses are failing the customer data protection test
First, there is no real test for ensuring that data is not misused, neglected,
or shared unlawfully, intentionally or unintentionally. Customer data is just
too portable.

There are a number of government and business groups taking this
very seriously, but they are simply outgunned by opportunistic data pirates
that game the system. Data pirates collect real dollars through fraud and
extortion.
Government, regulatory, and trade organizations use a number of secu-
rity, storage, encryption, and customer exchange standards, but Figure 11.1
shows that these are not working.
Note that a couple of the data breaches, particularly TJX and Heartland
systems, were targeted by malicious computer software that stole data
directly from the credit card processing servers and went undetected. While
a single breach causes alarm and concern, the fact that these two highly
reputable and specialized companies were breached and did not know it for
extended periods of time is enough to justify paranoia.
Many of the companies listed on the table have gone through formal
data and information systems audits to certify that they adhere to Sarbanes-
Oxley (SOX), Graham Leach Bliley (GLBA), Payment Card Industry (PCI), or
the Health Insurance and Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Yet,
these companies and many others like them are losing customer data at
an alarming rate.
Most people will likely be shocked by the brands highlighted in the
breached data table. How is it that our most trusted institutions in govern-
ment, medicine, health care, financial services, and education lose so much
data? They use names with addresses, Social Security numbers, and phone
numbers. This data should never be together in a single database because
doing so makes it an easy target for someone who wants to use it to apply
for a loan, get a credit card, impersonate someone, or destroy someone’s
credit or reputation.
What are the odds that any of this information is yours? Likely.
Figure 11.1 below is a subset of one year’s recent customer data breaches
collected from publicly available sources. The list is frightening because of
the millions of customers affected and the lack of adequate customer data
protections.

136 customer worthy
Figure 11.1
Company
Alleged Number
of Customers
Exposed
TJX
2,400 stores,
US Europe
Retail giant TJX said that a computer-security breach
stretched back 10 months earlier than the company
originally thought, compromising credit and debit
card data, drivers’license numbers, and names and
addresses.
45,700,000
Express
Scripts
Express Scripts received an extortion letter including
personal information on 75 members, including their
Social Security numbers, addresses, dates of birth, and
in some cases, prescription information.”
—Express Scripts website
50 million
prescriptions
Horizon
Blue Cross
Blue Shield
(Newark, NJ)
More than 300,000 members’names, Social Security
numbers, and other personal information were
accessed on a stolen laptop computer.
300,000
Kraft Foods
(Northfield,
IL)
A stolen company-owned laptop contained names,
maybe Social Security numbers of customers.
20,000
MTV
Networks
(Los Angeles)
Confidential employee data breached from outside:
names, birth dates, Social Security numbers, compensa-
tion.
5000
HPY—
Heartland
Payment
Systems
(Princeton,
NJ)
According to The New York Times, thieves stole data
undetected from May 2008 to late fall 2008. More than
500 financial institutions were affected. Customers
included more than 250,000 businesses ranging from
restaurants to retailers to payroll systems.
Unknown total
number of indi-
vidual customers;
100 million credit
card transactions
monthly
Pennsylvania
Department
of State
(Harrisburg,
PA)
Voter website programming error allowed anyone on
the Internet to view voter data: name, date of birth,
driver’s license number, political party. Some had last
four digits of Social Security number.
30,000
For a running list of data breaches reported on a monthly basis, see
www.privacyrights.org/ar/ChronDataBreaches.htm

Protect your customers, protect your business:
identification, authentication, and authorization
Business, accounting, and financial practices have not evolved to accom-
modate the needs of a digital age, which requires a whole different mindset
regarding identification, authentication, and authorization. Each of these
functions is required for every customer contact, but in the new digital world,
each element has to be treated separately in order to ensure a customer’s
privacy. Companies that take short cuts in order to complete transactions
and data exchanges more quickly and efficiently continue to be vulnerable
to fraud.
Consumers have personas based on where they live, where they shop,
what they buy, and how they buy. Your company needs to leverage this
information, most of which you already have, in order to more rigorously
identify customers and more closely meet your customers’ expectations. This
approach is not new and is most often used in fraud detection on credit card
processing networks, but it is obviously not used enough or used correctly.
This process works better for repeat customers than first time customers,
but it should be reasonably executed by most companies.
According to a report by the Ponemon Institute, a Tucson-based research
group, customer data breaches cost companies about $200 per customer
with 40 percent of the cost attributed to losing customers to lack of trust
and confidence. While breached data and identity theft are not the same
issue, customers suffer the damages and pay the expense of repairing their
information and reputation. Customers are the most vulnerable and least
in control of their own information.
Customers should be paid when companies use their data
One solution to the customer data problem may be to require customers to
manage their own data, which might also mean that only companies with
customer permission can access customer data. In other words, no company
would be allowed to use the data unless first approved by the customer.

138 customer worthy
Moving data control and access to the customer might also involve custom-
ers selling their own data to companies for marketing, research, and list sales
as is already taking place today. But customers would receive a statement
telling them who is using the data and they would be able to control the
types of use. The conclusion is that customers should be rewarded for shar-
ing their data and should also be provided a data usage statement showing
which companies use and store data; for which transactions and purposes;
where the data is used and stored; how often and recently the data was
accessed; and the purpose.
Companies using customer-owned and managed data would have a
lower fraud rate and a vested interest in ensuring that the customer infor-
mation is absolutely verifiable. Customer-owned data would also relieve
companies of any implied liability from misuse or incorrect data—two issues
that are likely to grow in the coming years as more information is digitized
and customer transparency broadens.

139
Chapter 12
Matrix Benefit and Use by Function
and Department
In the 21st century, everyone in a company has a sales, marketing and service
function, so every employee in every department needs to have the big mar-
keting picture and know how he or she fits in. This chapter explains how the
CxC Matrix can be used function-by-function, department-by-department to
get the entire company focused on the customer.
The new marketing
The average U.S. consumer receives several million marketing messages a
year, ranging from 3 million for relatively insular and disconnected custom-
ers to well over 100 million per year for heavy Internet users, mall shoppers,
game players, and television and video watchers.
In a constant battle to get customer attention, marketers leverage every
inch of text and electronic space and every second of customer face time.
Marketing messages appear in every contact both intentionally and unin-
tentionally.
Just as the number of messages sent to customers has exploded, the bur-
den of responding to customers—including creating and managing customer
contacts across every channel and consumer stage—has created unsustain-
able demands on marketing, customer support, advertising, and sales.

140 customer worthy
Customer contact management across departments
Many department resources support customer contact management across
customer support, advertising, marketing, sales, and fulfillment. Resources
are limited, and the demands of meeting every customer’s needs seven days
a week across any mix of circumstances and at every potential customer
contact is unreasonable and unsustainable. You cannot afford to grow mar-
keting staff, call center personnel, IT web page designers, and copywriters
in parallel with message volume requirements.
There is no more time or tolerance for traditional marketing, advertis-
ing, sales, service, and IT infrastructures that communicate with customers
disconnectedly and with tunnel vision that is concerned only with a limited
view of selected contacts and channel niches.
Messages must be designed, delivered, measured, and refined in drasti-
cally compressed timeframes to meet customer expectations. Near-time
communications, automated responses, and recommendations require
faster and faster execution times. They must approach zero message deliv-
ery latency for web and electronic messages, i.e., automated electronic bid-
ding; conditional, environmental, and rules-based product pricing; device
self-diagnostics; and unattended upgrades.
Message design, execution, measurement, and refinement
time compression
Figure 12.1
Channel
Time
What’s Next?
Then Now
Broadcast TV 6–9 months 1–12 weeks YouTube, Cam2Web
Direct Mail 3–5 months 1–2 weeks direct to print
Sales/Field Training 3–6 months 1–3 months sfa/crm tools
Newspaper Print 2–4 weeks 1–2 weeks digital press
Magazine 3–6 months 2–3 months digital/v press

12: Matrix Benefits and Use by Function and Department 141
Channel
Time
What’s Next?
Then Now
Brochure 1–4 months 1–3 weeks direct to print
Signage 1–4 months 1–8 weeks digital signs, web connected
Website 1–4 weeks day parts multi-party, dynamic content
Email weekly daily triggers, dynamic content
Blogs, social networking 2–7 days day parts continuous, near time
Whereas technology and delivery mechanisms have changed, the core
elements of direct marketing and direct communication have not. The CxC
Matrix addresses each of the four key elements used for decades by direct
marketers to govern message and contact design: List, Offer, Creative, and
Media. The percentages represent each component’s traditional contribution
to a contact’s performance.
List 50% who and when Targeting and segmentation
Offer 20% what and why What’s the deal?
Creative 10% copy and art
Interesting, entertaining,
attention-getting
Media 20% contact Channel, sequence, frequency
Your company needs a playbook
The CxC Matrix defines the marketing and communications roles for man-
aging customers across the entire customer life cycle for each corporate
department and business function.
The CxC Matrix framework, combined with the CxC Matrix Treatment Map
and message libraries comprise your company’s playbook, which describes
how the company will achieve its mission, strategy, and objectives executed
in each contact and monitored through CxC Matrix reports.
Managing hundreds to thousands of dynamically changing contacts

142 customer worthy
without a cohesive, corporate-wide structure and playbook dooms a com-
pany to:
Overspend on under-performing contacts and issues,
Under-fund highest return opportunities,
Waste customer and company time and money repeating broken
steps,
Overpay for new business, excessive cost of sales, and
Create highly inaccurate forecasting.
Now let’s take a look at the specific ways your company might use and
benefit from the CxC Matrix.
Executive Management
Strategy
The CxC Matrix deliberately aligns corporate objectives and goals with
customer values and preferences depicting customer worthiness at every
customer to company contact. Thus, it links department and individual deci-
sion results directly to customer performance. Linking strategy to activities
provides clear direction to all stakeholders and provides a means for each
employee to clearly delineate his or her role in overall customer success.
Visualizing and managing customer centricity
Many CEOs freely use the term “customer centricity” and tout the “customer-
centric” aspects of their corporate initiatives and strategies. Quick research
using Google and entering the terms “customer centric” and “annual report”
returns over 29,000 references. It lists the “customer-centric” claims and proc-
lamations of thousands of companies. Yet most executives equate “custom-
ers” with sales and “customer performance” with “customer satisfaction” or
•
•
•
•
•

“Net Promoter Score,” all of which are lagging performance measures. Worse
yet, who at the company owns “customer” and “customer performance?”
Two individuals? Two departments? All employees need to clearly see their
role in the customer’s context, how their decisions and job performance
impact customer value.
Fixing the disconnect between strategy and activity
Despite talk about being customer-centric, rarely does executive and consult-
ing rhetoric connect to execution or to employee activities, responsibilities
and reward systems. As a result, few employees understand their connection
to customers. They do not bother to learn how the decisions they make affect
customers because, “that’s not my job.” Few employees can describe their
company’s end-to-end customer experience or the stages of their consum-
ers’ buying cycle.
The CxC Matrix depicts the roles of departments and managers as these
roles relate to customers. Strategy is directly connected to goals, tactics, and
actions with clear and simple ongoing performance measurements.
Transparency from decisions to effects
It is much easier for employees to get enthusiastic about customers than
it is to generate enthusiasm for intangible metrics. The CxC Matrix helps
company leaders rally employees around a common goal: customer value
growth, while clearly delineating the customer contact points and respon-
sible parties across the company.
The Matrix exposes the number of customers affected by a single deci-
sion and the resulting effects by customer, customer segment, market, and
consumer cycle. Does offering a discount to a customer for his initial busi-
ness result in greater customer lifetime value and loyalty, or do discounted
customers always gravitate to the lowest cost provider? Do emails that
remind customers about bill payments raise collections performance, or
do phone calls to a select group of customer types perform better? And

144 customer worthy
which customers have greater longevity? Measuring decision impact fosters
accountability, collaboration, and innovation.
Although few employees can grasp their connection to financial perfor-
mance numbers and the intricacies and mechanics of financial statements,
using CxC Matrix visualizations, employees can see how their actions and
decisions connect to customer behavior and performance, providing them
with a sense of ownership and pride. Tying performance measurements
directly to customer performance motivates employees to focus on specific
activities that drive success.
The CxC Matrix lets executive managers see activities across the organi-
zation while measuring customer responsiveness and monetizing success.
Linking customer behavior to tactics supported by the company’s strat-
egy reduces learning cycle time, improving your company’s nimbleness and
visibility to market fluctuations, competitors, and unforeseen events.
The Matrix provides management tools for quickly assessing the cost
and benefit opportunities of new initiatives, product offers, mergers, acquisi-
tions, and market entries by linking the company’s resources and processes
to customer opportunities. The Matrix can be used to generate market and
customer simulations across a multitude of scenarios to expose the resource,
cost, revenue, risk, market, and customer impact.
Innovation and leadership
A manager’s expanded view of internal operations and activities in the
customer’s context often uncovers numerous opportunities for repurpos-
ing, repackaging, and repricing services, while also uncovering untapped
customer needs. Continuous observation of where, how, when, with whom
and under what circumstances customers use and access your products and
services often spawns innovation and new market discoveries.
Corporate guidance is executed at each customer contact and measured
for its effectiveness on an ongoing basis to ensure that the company is
operating in synchronization with customer needs to fully realize market
potential.

Budget allocation
Executives use the Matrix to weigh the benefits of competing budget
requests using impact-per-customer as the criteria for “go” and “no go”
decisions.
Departments weighing investment decisions for new initiatives should
be required to demonstrate the cost and revenue associated with their rec-
ommendations. The Matrix highlights which specific customers and seg-
ments will be affected and the associated revenue and cost consequences,
while also quickly highlighting operational and time-to-market issues.
The Matrix provides an alert when multiple departments’ decisions affect
the same customers and a means to overlay multiple department and cor-
porate initiatives to uncover potential tactical, process, departmental, and
customer conflicts.
Executive Management CxC Matrix deliverables
Visualize: Company-wide strategy by customer.
Analyze: Weave customer metrics into corporate decision-making.
Monetize: Resource investment measured by yield per customer.
Prioritize: Target resources and investments at ROI initiatives.
Optimize: Establish procedures, measurements, and reward
systems to promote continuous performance improvement
customer-by-customer and contact-by-contact.
Finance
Financial managers use the CxC Matrix in conjunction with other financial
tools to assess enterprise-wide and departmental cost and revenue at a
budget line and departmental level. The Matrix provides a means to assess,
quantify, and monitor budget and resource decisions based on customer
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146 customer worthy
impact and is especially useful to complement other risk and decision sce-
nario assessment tools.
Accountability
The Matrix helps finance managers observe business performance by cus-
tomer and by contact. This information is directly linked to the responsible
manager, systems, and activities, providing exceptional insight into revenue
and cost drivers. Contacts and activities tied directly to business owners and
measured by customer performance provide improved budget and resource
governance and monitoring. Financial analysts can assess the impact of cost
reductions or budget reallocations by the impact per customer, as well as
uncover unforeseen negative impacts.
For example, you can study cost reduction in a call center, changing hours
of operation for a particular office, or charging for a previously free service
and run through scenarios to project customer impact and the resulting
impact on revenue and costs.
Activity-based costing from a customer basis
If your company uses activity-based costing methods to scrutinize depart-
ment and company budgets, you can benefit from linking customer transac-
tion costs, department activity costs, and the Matrix’s projections for future
activities. The customer dimension adds additional insights into “what if”
scenario planning, cost allocation, and cost attribution dynamics.
The Matrix is designed to connect and relate products, expenses, activi-
ties, lines of business, overhead, and resources in the way that a customer
uses them. It explicitly shows which customers and which customer groups
are affected by resource and service changes.
Customer performance benchmarking
Financial and business analysts use the Matrix for monitoring “business as
usual” and exception management analysis by observing aggregate cus-

tomer and activity counts by channel, department, and activity. A fluc-
tuation in any performance indicator alerts analysts to an unforeseen and
unanticipated change in business. Analysts are able to quickly isolate the
abnormal area and drill down to the causes while alerting departments about
downstream impact and changes to revenue and cost forecasts.
Explaining finance to internal clients using customers
as a metric
Business analysts, statisticians, and people responsible for designing math-
ematical models and business simulations can use the Matrix visualization
as a backdrop to explain how predictive models and root cause analysis is
performed and where the results of their work can be put into action. The
Matrix provides a means for modelers and business analysts to explain how
decisions made in one contact or stage can affect performance. The Matrix’s
graphics, with numbers included to delineate customer path, depict the busi-
ness process in a manner that enables technicians and business managers
to collaborate on building, measuring, and refining optimum solutions.
Fewer financial surprises
By providing transparency down to a customer and activity level and visibility
across all customer life stages, the Matrix reduces the likelihood of financial
performance surprises.
Finance CxC Matrix deliverables
Visualize: Revenue flow and costs across the enterprise linked to
customers and activities.
Analyze: Set benchmarks and be alert for deviations. Alert manag-
ers to changes and financial reporting impact.
Monetize: Monitor the cost and potential revenue of each cus-
tomer and each customer contact.
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148 customer worthy
Prioritize: Projects, budget decisions, critical business areas and
risks based on impact.
Optimize: Continuously monitor contacts for opportunistic invest-
ment and cost avoidance.
Information Technology and Systems Management
The mower story
The mower story from earlier in the book implies that the Acme Company
is in lockstep with the customer’s needs, interests, and ability to pay. As
has been pointed out, this is not by chance but by a carefully thought-out
execution of multiple contacts with scripted messages purposely designed to
drive the customer to act. This process illustrates the benefits of capturing
and leveraging customer information across each contact for use in future
contacts and programs.
Figure 12.2
Knowledge available at each contact
Customer Product Behavior Marketing
• Age
• Income
• Location/
proximity
• Channel
• Projected value
• Lifetime value
• Brand
• Use history
• Service record
• Expectancy
• Features
• History
• Purchase
• Contact history
• Campaigns
• Responses
• Channels
Maintaining a record of each customer’s contacts, preferences, ability to
pay, and particular nuances is no longer just inside the heads of the best
•
•

performing sales people. Today, that information is contained in a variety of
customer information files from internal and external sources.
This information ensures the best possible outcome at each customer
contact point, from scope of offers to script messages. It can be used to
alert downstream systems, schedule resources, and for inventory prepara-
tion—all in anticipation of the customer’s next move. Information from each
customer sequence can be recycled to benefit internal contact resources,
partners, third parties, and even customers, as in the now famous Amazon
web page message, “Customers like you also purchased . . . ”
Structuring the mower program using the Matrix enabled each depart-
ment to reuse the successful program elements without bearing signifi-
cant expense and complexity for future programs. Additionally, isolating
and documenting all of the program’s elements enabled managers to test
under-performing components while automating and reducing the cost of
successful elements.
The Matrix does not assume a company has or will have to build a data
warehouse in order to intelligently manage each customer contact. The
Matrix design assumes that data sources will constantly evolve in the ways
they collect, capture, and store customer and contact data. Therefore, it is
not reasonable or cost justifiable to consolidate all customer and contact
information in one place. Instead, the Matrix represents data and functions
that may exist in third party systems, partners, and vendor systems. It relies
on the framework, business, and data integration exchanges and rules to
deliver a cohesive and singularly transparent customer experience.
The CxC Matrix system analysis
The challenge for today’s technology and information professionals is to
design and manage a corporate customer architecture that reaches out
across the company and across the Internet to integrate and transform vast
volumes of available data as quickly as possible into information assets that
generate new insights and realize new business opportunities.

150 customer worthy
Such an undertaking is no small task. Today’s enterprise systems extend
beyond the walls of the corporate data center to include customers, suppli-
ers, partners, and electronic marketplaces. These systems interact with data-
bases, application servers, content management systems, data warehouses,
workflow systems, search engines, message queues, web crawlers, mining
and analysis packages, and other enterprise applications.
It is important to note that “systems” is used to describe electronic sys-
tems as well as non-electronic systems, such as putting an envelope in a box,
physically moving around a store, and handwritten notes indicating inven-
tory counts and product notations. The Matrix is meant to capture and map
every customer contact—intentional, unintentional, scripted, unscripted,
firsthand, secondhand, or even corporate and customer folklore.
Figure 12.3
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.Community
• direct mail
• web
• outbound
• telemarketing
• email
• banner ads
• portals
• web
• coupon
• ccm
•vru
• directTV
• aggregators
• ccm
• web
• chat
• service auto
• collaborators
• fulfillment
• web
elogistics
• ecollection
• lock box
• ebilling
• ccm
• CCM
• elogistics
• return
processing
• fulfillment
• web
• ccm
• partners
• web
• contracts
• usage
tracking
• web
• direct mail
• CCM
•VRU
• directTV
• 3G
•personalization
• email
• web
• personalization
• direct sales
• CCM
• loyalty
• continuity
• automated service
• email
• service automation
• fulfillment
• form sharing
• web
• CCM
• chat
•VOLP
• fulfillment
• elogistics
• email
• service alerts
• CCM
• CCM
• email
• self help
• knowledge
base
• chat
• direct mail
• continuity
• enewsletter
• web
• CCM
• eCRM
• portal

Technology investment decisions
Technology groups use the Matrix to weigh budget allocations for customer
systems and customer system functionality as measured by the impact per
customer or customer group. For example, a company seeking to purchase
a customer relationship management system can demonstrate the value of
the system by estimating the additional customer revenue that the system
will generate by consumer and channel stage.
Additionally, when comparing proposed systems with similar functional-
ity, the Matrix can be used to isolate the benefits of that functionality and
its impact on the customer contacts.
Project management prioritization
Technology departments can use the Matrix to prioritize projects in a devel-
opment queue and help allocate limited resources by plotting the areas that
will be affected and the net benefit of each project, measured by increased
customer revenue and decreased activity cost.
Figure 12.4 Sample List of CxC Matrix Systems
Accounting
Advertising
Business intelligence
Business performance
management
Business process management
Call routing
Care center inbound
Compensation
Contact management
Content management
Cost accounting
Credit authorization
Credit modeling
Crm (customer relationship
management)
Customer service
Customer survey
Data matching
Device design
Device management
Digital asset management
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Direct marketing
Distribution
Email hosting
Email management
Enterprise marketing
management
Erp (enterprise resource
process) management
Financial reporting
Fraud detection
Fulfillment
Game management
General ledger
Inbound telemarketing
Integrated communications
Inventory
It operations
Lead management
Licensing
List management
Location security
Logistics
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Maintenance
Marketing automation
Master data management
Modeling
Network design
Offer management
Order management
Outbound telemarketing
Packaging
Partner management
Performance management
Performance reporting
Point-of-sale
Point-of-purchase
Predictive modeling
Printing
Public relations
Quality systems
Resource management
Returns processing
Reverse logistics sales
automation
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Security
Self service
Self service kiosk
Self service mobile
Self service phone
Self service web
Shipping
Social media
Statistics
Subscription management
Supply chain management
Telephony
Text-to-voice
Voice-to-text
Web analytics
Web chat
Web hosting
Web presentation
Web security
Work flow
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•
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•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
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152 customer worthy
Visual aid for data and process mapping
Business analysts and information technology workers use CxC Matrix visu-
alizations to scope database and data coordination designs across dispa-
rate systems, identifying integration points and data exchanges. The Matrix
provides a schematic that connects customers to all company systems,
including third party systems that are sometimes not considered part of
IT planning.
The Matrix emphasizes and highlights the importance of process design
from the customer’s perspective, delineating success and failure points from
a customer point of view while providing a performance metric for justifying
process redesign or alternative resource investment.
Information Technology CxC Matrix deliverables
Visualize: Comprehensive customer technology architecture; cus-
tomer data movement; systems integration points; department
to department connectivity; third party connectivity; process
flow; customer information ecosystem; data, system, process
gaps; world class customer infrastructure design.
Analyze: Technology investments, prototype system designs,
resource and technical alternatives, outsourcing, data quality,
disaster recovery, security, system vulnerability, fraud.
Monetize: Projects, IT investments, data, data quality, outsourced
partners, expert systems.
Prioritize: Resources, technology investments, solution areas, IT
investment allocation.
Optimize: Infrastructure, resource allocation, customer data
process flows, reporting and alert systems, business process
management initiatives.
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•

Operations
Merchandising
The mower story might drive you crazy if you work in operations or if you
own or manage a local store. You might think, “Am I supposed to have 20
lawn mowers of each variety stored at each location in the hope that some-
one might click on that email?”
In the background, the mechanics of this program started with a con-
tinuously running computer program, which detected that a particular store
had too many lawn mowers in stock. The mower was then targeted for
liquidation, and the company’s analytical and operations technology linked
together to propose scenarios designed to achieve the highest profit point
by the fastest means possible.
The program calculated a number of liquidation options, including mov-
ing the mowers to another store, selling the mowers to a wholesaler, and
returning them to the manufacturer. The inventory system noted that the
mowers were assembled, which added costs and constrained liquidation
options.
The program was designed to match company, finance, partner, and
customer objectives respectively:
Sell the product at the highest achievable margin,
Gain new customers,
Grow relationships, and
Achieve optimum yield per customer.
The program evaluated the options for moving the lawn mowers through
each of its channels, calculated the total costs, and predicted best customer
and stakeholder outcomes. The program recommended that the mowers be
promoted directly to the store’s local market, to existing customers who
lived within a 15-minute drive of the store, and who bought a similar or
less-featured mower more than two years ago.
The program aligned the company’s objectives with customer values and
preferences to achieve the best outcome for the business and the customer.
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154 customer worthy
The program performed these calculations and decision-making as a back-
ground process with no human intervention. The eventual program was put
into motion from need to concept to initiation in less than three seconds.
Distribution
The Matrix delivers product demand and associated resource demand by
channel, contact point, and time window, exposing most of the elements
in the customer demand chain. Where possible, it connects the product or
service needs and requests of specific customers to specific distribution
outlets.
Advanced logistics, inventory management, and shipment planning sys-
tems can be linked to the Matrix to provide deeper insight into resource
consumption, alternative delivery planning, and short-term, mid-term, sea-
sonal, and long-term outsourcing opportunities.
Quality controls
The Matrix delineates the cost and revenue impact of poor quality products
and service delivery by measuring it in lost revenue and increased customer
management costs. These insights linked to the stages of the consumer cycle
highlight where business processes or quality problems might jeopardize
an entire product line, geography, line of business, or commercial channel
such as ecommence.
Outsourcing
As outsourcing and co-sourcing continue to grow as resource solutions, you
need to be able to measure their impact on customer flow, customer value
and the entire consumer cycle. For example, do outsourced product repair
services have a negative impact on repeat sales? Does one delivery process
and set of vendors impact customer profitability differently than another

alternative? Typically, these types of decisions are made with sparse data,
gut instinct, and focus group surveys. However, the Matrix provides a means
for experimenting with hypothetical scenarios and quantifying the customer
impacts of changes. Then it provides a means for ongoing monitoring and
measurement.
The customer perspective also provides the added benefit of parsing
customer flows so that high value customers receive preferred treatment
and resources while lower value customers are directed to lower cost solu-
tions. Using the Matrix, you can experiment in share-gain relationships with
outsourcers where the third party directly benefits in a proportional share
of the increased yield per contact. Each contact should be evaluated as a
platform for additional revenue streams, as well as an opportunity to grow
the sponsor company’s long-term customer value.
Vendor negotiations
You can use explicit customer flow metrics and their related revenues and
coststonegotiateperformancecontractswithvendorsandpartners.Whereas
some companies use customer survey samples or customer observation
sampling at selected operational stages, the CxC Matrix provides a consis-
tent operations metric covering all contacts (call backs, returns, complaints,
unpaid items, etc.) overtime, pinning success to actual customer value.
Operations CxC Matrix deliverables
Visualize: Product, service, and resource demand; supply chain
linkages; demand chain; inability of vendor to coordinate with
others; resource allocation; demand flow; inventory movement;
customer management flow; world-class customer operations
design.
Analyze: Resource utilization, alternative resource configurations,
just in time service/product opportunities.
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156 customer worthy
Monetize: Product and service outages, resource utilization,
unused message slots, customer satisfaction, and vendor man-
agement.
Prioritize: Process and system upgrades, critical path revenue and
cost operations.
Optimize: Supply chain, demand chain, vendor and supplier
resources, distribution, asset management, facilities configura-
tion, and expert contact management.
Human Resources
My company, my job from a customer’s perspective
The CxC Matrix is the best tool for educating employees about how a busi-
ness operates from a customer perspective. It lets employees walk the
customer’s path while showing the departments, managers, systems, and
processes that support each consumer stage.
New employees, transitioning employees, and managers benefit from
improved understanding of the functions related to meeting customer
expectations. The performance numbers, customer value, customer life-
time revenue, and costs become clear and simple measures that employees
grasp.
Employees also tend to feel a sense of responsibility when they under-
stand the company’s role in meeting customers’ needs.
Education roles and goals
The Matrix provides employees with a sense of ownership, accountability,
and responsibility, and human resources managers benefit from the employ-
ees’ broader knowledge of corporate operations. This makes it possible to
improve business problem-solving while stressing the importance of com-
munication skills, reporting, quality efforts, and documentation.
•
•
•

The Matrix’s trans-departmental and trans-functional design broadens
employees’ perspective regarding their individual impact on overall business.
It makes them aware of the operations and provides some education regard-
ing other departments, functions, and systems across the company.
The customer-eye view encourages employees to participate in suggest-
ing solutions and making recommendations about improving operations,
functions, and policies. Employees may uncover marketing, analytical, pro-
cess design, or selling skill sets that would otherwise go unnoticed. The
enterprise view assists in career development by providing employees with
exposure to the skills required and the functions performed in other parts
of the company.
Resource planning and scheduling
Managers and employees use the Matrix to observe customer flow and activ-
ity at different times of the day, different days of the week, and different
seasons to appropriately schedule resources and ensure that the right skills
are available at each critical customer contact point.
Pay performance and incentive design
Managers also use the Matrix and associated key performance indicators
to evaluate employee job performance. The CxC Matrix creates simple, vis-
ible, and common benchmarks for monitoring ongoing job performance,
as well as quantifying performance related to each employee’s activities
and decisions.
The CxC Matrix measures the value of individual employee decisions
and activities on business growth and cost containment. Managers find
the Matrix suitable for designing, monitoring, and executing incentive pay
structures and performance rewards systems based on customer perfor-
mance. The metrics are standardized in the system, providing consistency
over time. Yet its breadth shows where upstream and downstream events
and circumstances may positively or negatively influence performance.

158 customer worthy
Human Resources CxC Matrix deliverables
Visualize: The customer journey across departments, functions,
systems, and the employee’s individual role.
Analyze: Employee performance, interdepartmental processes,
resource allocation, scheduling, payment, and reward systems.
Monetize: The impacts of decision-making, activity, quality initia-
tives, and customer satisfaction.
Prioritize: Specific functions within roles, department resource
requirements.
Optimize: Customer yield per employee.
Sales
A primary Matrix business objective is to make the company and the
customer-facing resource in each contact look great, wise, helpful, and
knowledgeable. The accumulation of previous contact success, customer
information, marketing knowledge and successful resolutions learned and
stored from similar customers allows the company to effortlessly deliver a
perfect, profitable contact experience.
Salespeople (which includes everyone, since everyone is in sales) must
understand:
Where the customer is in the buying process,
The channels and activities the customer conducted, and
An estimate of the customer’s next actions, timing, needs and
contacts.
All of this must be balanced with the customer’s potential value and the
probability of achieving that value.
In a perfect system, the CxC Matrix not only shows what customers
have done, but it predicts what they are likely to do next and when. The
system alerts the salesperson and resources around the company when a
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•

customer does not act, and it provides them with the means to re-engage
the customer through the right channel with the right message, offer, or
recommendation. Then it monitors the potential outcome. It is important
to remember that “do nothing” is often an option when a customer has a
low probability of acting over the next 60 days and when the customer has
a low probability of ever buying or making a customer referral.
You’re invited to the 1% Success Party
Marketers and salespeople like to tell customer success stories like the
one about the mower, emphasizing the excellent coordination, foresight,
customer insight, analytics, and programming. But they shy away from
discussing the fact that marketing and sales efforts rarely achieve double-
digit success.
Less than one percent of most promotional email programs, direct mail,
telemarketing, and other advertising programs result in a sale. The best
salespeople achieve success rates of less than 10 percent per customer con-
tact, and most of them achieve less than 1 percent.
Marketing does not put up banners that say, “We hit 1%!” Salespeople
don’t celebrate making 40 sales pitches to get a single meeting or to get
one person to actually buy “the mower.” The real opportunity in marketing
and sales lies in the 99 percent of the wasted contacts.
One fallacy of traditional sales and marketing measurements was illus-
trated in the simple need, shop, buy example earlier in the book. Compa-
nies under-represent the number of contacts responsible for making the
eventual sale or solving a customer problem. Yet all of the other contacts
that the company conducts and funds likely contribute to the eventual sale.
Companies that fail to recognize the contribution and value of all related
contacts are in danger of under-investing or eliminating the contact points
that ultimately persuade a customer to purchase.
The Matrix unveils the 99 percent of unmentioned contacts, plus all of
the post-sale contacts, to expose hundreds of additional cross-sell, up-sell,
referral, and affiliate revenue opportunities.

160 customer worthy
Examining the program from the business side demonstrates typical
marketing and sales efficacy, while emphasizing the extreme importance
of success at each consumer cycle. As fewer customers progress through
the customer cycle, revenue success depends on fewer prospects, but more
contacts.
In a multi-wave marketing program customers are targeted more than once
and often across multiple channels in a predefined sequence using a set of
rules to orchestrate follow-up contacts.
The mower program insights
The mower marketing program was one component in a multi-wave-market-
ing program. It matched multiple customer groups to multiple marketing,
sales, and customer service programs.
Sales CxC Matrix deliverables
Visualize: Customer pipeline by stage and channel activity;
upcoming customer activities and stalled customers; revenue
opportunities across the entire company; costly low potential
prospects.
Analyze: Return on sales channel, sales territories and rationale,
opportunity potential versus sales resource constraints, season-
ality, demand chain; pipeline barriers, downstream impact to
customer lifetime value.
Monetize: Customers, activities, sales investment, sales cycle,
return per activity per channel, sales partners, markets, regions,
revenue/lead cost per source.
Prioritize: Activities and resource allocation, margin per product
and service combinations, lead sources, existing relationships,
portfolio management, partners.
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•

Optimize: Activities and resource allocation, lead generation and
cost per lead by stage and channel, referrals, cross-sales, up-sells,
affiliate sales, margin per sale, margin per customer.
Legal
Your company is vulnerable to liability at each stage of the CxC Matrix. From
customer data breaches to misrepresentation of services, account misman-
agement, negligence, physical injury, etc., the Matrix graphically represents
every customer contact along with every company promise and obligation
across all stages of the consumer cycle. Additionally, the Matrix provides
managers with performance visibility and risk assessment capabilities that
show responsibilities related to governance, performance reporting, perfor-
mance disclosures, and material events.
The Matrix provides an overview of most of the customer liability areas,
and it also provides a means for recovery, customer notification, and cus-
tomer path re-creation that can be used to remedy the effects of an event,
product, or service. The Matrix provides a means to quantify an event’s expo-
sure, the number of potential customers affected, and the contact points
related to any incident.
The CxC Matrix can also be used to retrace a customer’s communications,
notices, and instructions, as well as all of his contacts—actual and assumed
(based on probability of like customers). This allows you to comprehensively
recreate a customer’s entire relationship with your company. Consumer cycle
re-creation provides you with a road map for where, when, and how often to
provide customer instructions, warnings, support, and assistance regarding
the uses and alternative uses of products.
Legal departments and corporate counsel should use the CxC Matrix to
help customers manage their own relationships by providing a customer-
centric road map that highlights all company, industry, market, legal,
government, and trade sources. These references and guidance materials
•

162 customer worthy
across each CxC Matrix stage serve as a virtual “You are here” map for every
customer across the information gathering, purchasing, use, and disposal
consumer cycles.
Legal departments should also consider geographic laws and regulations
relative to product and service delivery. Countries, states, regions, towns, and
channels have different governing bodies, each of which may require their
own version of product and service delivery, disclosures, notifications, fees,
and taxes. The CxC Matrix can be modified for each region to document
and ensure compliance while providing material proof of your company’s
acknowledgement and enforcement. Likewise, you can analyze the impact,
cost, and resources required when entering new markets and when regula-
tion changes are being considered.
Note: Managers who move from one region to another should be
briefed using the Matrix in order to highlight important customer
notification, disclosure, liability, information, and treatment differ-
ences from their prior posts.
Issues of privacy
As customer treatments become more complex, dynamic, and multi-party,
it is inevitable that legal and regulatory bodies will demand that compa-
nies provide greater transparency to the elements used for each treatment.
With digitization and the speed of information exchanged between compa-
nies and from system to system, customers will demand to see how their
personal information is used to determine pricing, customer service, or
warranty coverage. Regulators will slowly seek to understand the mechan-
ics of proprietary and dynamic pricing and offer systems, as well as their
affect on fair trade, product distribution, and service distribution.
Likewise, customers will be within their assumed rights to ask companies
to recreate the context and rules used to construct special offers, messages,
and pricing.

Our data went where?
Data breeches will continue to grow as more information and transactions
are digitized. As a result, personal and confidential information provided
by customers will be continually at risk. Additionally, company information
stores and data networks will continue to be pirated, poached, and hijacked,
requiring companies to insist on additional third party customer authenticity
validation and authorization among payment systems and partners.
Customer backlash is a likely result of the increased exposure of con-
fidential data. Legal or governmental representatives may demand specific
disclosures regarding how, why, when, where, and for what purpose customer
information was stored, accessed, and modeled by companies other than
the business customers believed they were dealing with directly. Transpar-
ency is ripe for continued scrutiny, whether to data vendors, credit bureaus,
transaction processors, data exchange, integration companies, subsidiaries,
or lines of business.
It is likely that companies will face not only growing legal and financial
liability for misuse, mishandling, and negligence related to customer data,
but also for not using customer data when that information could benefit
the customer, as in the “Mad Cow” case reported in the Washington Post (July
6, 2004). Although some customers are troubled by the privacy implications
of data capture, many assume that their information will be used to their
benefit. Customers are likely to also assume that they should have access to
their personal information in the company’s context. They will want to see
who had access to their information and how their information was used to
conduct business. If these assumptions are not met, a negative customer
experience could result.
In the “Mad Cow” case mentioned above, a female customer had pur-
chased ground beef from a local market, using her customer loyalty card,
which recorded every item she bought.
She used the beef to cook a holiday dinner and only a couple of weeks
later learned from a newspaper article that 10,000 pounds of beef potentially

164 customer worthy
tainted by mad-cow disease (MCD) had been recalled from stores in Western
states, including hers. She read about another customer whose purchase had
been recalled after he demanded that the store check his customer loyalty
card to determine if the meat he had purchased was part of the recall.
The female customer then asked that her card be checked to verify the
safety of the meat she fed to her family. However, the store made her make
the request in writing and come to the store’s office for the records. She
eventually learned that the meat she had fed her family was part of the
recall. The result was a lawsuit against the store, claiming that it had the
ability to alert her to the recall and did not do so.
Legal CxC Matrix deliverables
Visualize: Customer contacts and implied liability by life stage,
channel, product, market, and region
Analyze: Exposure, remedy scenarios, risk insurance coverage,
partner/vendor liability
Monetize: Cost to notify affected customers, scope of various
legal scenarios, cost of compliance and governance, exposure and
risk related to data handling
Prioritize: Communications points, highest risk business areas,
documentation, communication guidelines and procedures.
Optimize: Issue discovery and escalation, insurance protection,
risk prevention
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Customer Service
“Eighty percent of 2,049 US adults surveyed decided never to go back to a
business/organization after a bad customer service experience. The study
clearly indicates that an organization’s customer service level is a defining
factor that will make or break a company.”
—“Studies Reveal Consumer Reaction to Bad Customer Service”,
TMCNET.com
Companies invest millions of dollars in customer service and satisfaction
surveys, brand research, awareness studies, and measures like Net Promotion
Score and J.D. Power. Unfortunately, these same companies often find it dif-
ficult to persuade executives, workers, and shareholders that the information
reported has a direct impact on company performance.
The Matrix measures how customers “vote with their feet” and does
not rely on self-reported information or sample surveys from customers.
However, traditional surveys and research techniques can greatly enhance
the Matrix by isolating customers at individual stages and channels to poll
them as to why they did or didn’t move forward with a purchase decision,
as well as why they purchased again. The Matrix can be used to identify
pockets of customers who hold substantial potential revenue, cost, or risk.
These groups of customers can be isolated, analyzed, polled, scrutinized, and
tested to develop actionable, measurable business performance improve-
ment initiatives.
The Matrix acts as a sensor across all customer contacts to alert each
contact point regarding anticipated customer contacts, contact timing, vol-
umes, and interests. The Matrix can also be used to capture best performing
tactics and methods for quick replication across the rest of the customer
contact points.
Since the Matrix tags customers at each stage in their process, your
managers can anticipate contact flow when an increase in similar customer

166 customer worthy
problems arise or when new marketing messages and promotions hit the
market, resulting in increased volumes of customer phone calls, emails,
and site visits.
The Matrix records customer service contacts and post-contact customer
activities, providing the most reliable measure of problem resolution and
customer satisfaction.
Eighty-nine percent of people who owned cars from a certain manufacturer
said they were very satisfied, and 67 percent said they intended to purchase
another car from that manufacturer. Fewer than 20 percent actually did.
In another survey, nearly half of consumers said poor service led them to
change service providers in at least one industry in the past year.When asked
to further explain their reasons for switching, the greatest number of these
respondents (61 percent) identified poor service or product quality; to get
lower prices (46 percent); a service representative’s lack of knowledge about
a provider’s services or products (39 percent); lack of customized solutions
(22 percent); company policies that create bureaucracy (19 percent); and
technologies that delay or stop service (19 percent).
“Poor Customer Service is Top Reason Consumers Switch Service Providers,
Accenture Survey Finds,”Business Wire, 7/26/05
Root cause problem analysis
Customer problems don’t start in customer service; they end up there. The
CxC Matrix tracks customers from awareness through disposal. Customer
service representatives and customer process designers can trace problems
back to their root cause because the Matrix tracks every company, prod-
uct, partner, and community contact. It replays the whole story from the
customer’s perspective.

Customer Rage Points across the CxC Matrix
The 2005 National Customer Rage Study, sponsored by the Customer Care Al-
liance (CCA) in collaboration with the W.P. Carey School of Business at the
University of Arizona, provides insight into the causes and consequences of
customer rage.The study focused on the most serious problems experienced
by individuals (random sample of U.S. households) with products and ser-
vices during the period August 2004 through August 2005.
Seventy percent of all respondents reported rage with customer service due
to (in order of occurrence):
1. Unsatisfactory product (includes financial products);
2. Unsatisfactory service;
3. Incorrect/deceptive billing;
4. Unsatisfactory repair;
5. Product/service is not as agreed upon;
6. Deceptive advertising/packaging/pricing; and
7. Dealer/salesperson misrepresented the product/service.
The most common “damages suffered” included loss of time (53%); loss of
money (30%); and physical injury (5%).

168 customer worthy
Mismanaged contacts spawn additional costs across a company in obvi-
ous areas like shipping, repair, call handling, and returns, but the Matrix also
quantifies additional costs caused by forfeited future business, negative
word-of-mouth, and customer replacement. The Matrix clearly shows the
cost of mismanaged contacts with a high potential-value customer and mar-
ket segment. But it also provides a comprehensive view of the resources and
options for rectifying or rerouting high potential–value customers through
alternative process and customer paths.
Help yourself
The Matrix is designed to help you design self-service processes and guide-
lines so that customers can self-navigate their own solutions or contribute
to building better solutions.
Managers use the Matrix to plot customer service recovery and care
contact procedures, paths, best practices, and metrics. The Matrix provides
a unique view of problem resolution that exposes alternative channels and
resources along with a customer-specific historical view of all steps and
channels that a customer has journeyed.
As technology becomes more advanced, you may be embedding ser-
vice recovery tools, alerts, and notifications in your products. One obvious
example is a car service alert that notifies a customer that service is recom-
mended in 1,000 miles. Another example is a printer notification message
that alerts service companies and suppliers. Still another is a new product
reminder delivered to a sales prospect based on prior inquiries, which uses
the estimated life expectancy and replacement cycle of the selected product.
It may also include a special financing offer for the new product.
You should perform a similar exercise for your business to chart customer
paths and highlight where customer recommendations should be inserted.
These will add value to a customer’s overall experience and generate contacts
to ensure future business and revenue, both direct and indirect.

Improved customer management—using Situational Awareness
Situational Awareness (SA) is one of the CxC Matrix’s fundamental design
principles. In customer service, Situational Awareness can be defined as
understanding what is happening with the customer so you can figure out
how to help.
The CxC Matrix uses situational awareness principles to prepare cus-
tomer-facing personnel for assessing customer situations and solutions.
More importantly, SA is used as a basis for automating the many decision
functions required to support unattended situations where an employee is
not engaged in a company decision.
Generating revenue from captive contacts
You can use a sophisticated telephone system that intelligently routes calls
based on caller ID, customer registration, or neighborhood information.
This determines which call center, customer service representatives (CSRs),
treatment, and offer the caller will receive. The telephone system exchanges
data with the offer management system, order management system, and
customer management systems to continuously monitor and reprioritize call
and offer allocations. This refines the allocations based on offer performance,
resource availability, and contact success. The intelligent call routing system
usually reduces call center costs because calls from both new and repeat
customers are resolved quickly and to everyone’s satisfaction.
Outsourcing agreements and business processes
Your company can continue to seek opportunities to outsource customer
contact functions, customer support, email hosting, offer design and man-
agement, copywriting, and product and service design and automation. You
should knowingly choose which contacts you must maintain in-house or
under direct management in order to leverage your company’s core com-
petencies. Then you must monitor the strategic fitness and cost benefit

170 customer worthy
of outsourcing every other function. The Matrix provides a means for you
to dictate explicit service levels and process level terms for any outsourc-
ing arrangement, while also providing performance visibility measured by
customer.
Customer Service“Think Like a Customer”deliverables
Visualize: Individual customer paths, aggregate customer paths,
detailed customer interaction directory, best-in-class contact
design.
Analyze: Customer service resource allocation, root cause problem
analysis, contact flow, resolution processes, partner and affiliate
contacts, customer satisfaction relative to customer paths.
Monetize: Value per customer, contact, call incident, resolution,
revenue saved per customer, add-on revenue per customer, cus-
tomer cross-sells, up-sells, and referrals.
Prioritize: Match resources to opportunities, isolate problem
sources, high potential customers, low performing contact points.
Optimize: Resolution path, customer referral process, customer
review process, customer successes, and best practice process
templates.
Customer Relationship Management—CRM
The true measure of CRM is change that impacts each customer in each
contact. Customers expect simplicity.
Many companies have invested billions of dollars on Customer Relation-
ship Management (CRM) systems, implementations, consulting, and out-
sourcing. Yet customer satisfaction scores continue to decline, and customer
rage and frustration continues to grow.
How can it be that these enormous investments have created less satis-
fied and more disgruntled customers?
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Figure 12.5
Customer
value
management
Step 1:
Customer
definition
∂
Step 2:
Customer
value
(monetize)
∂
Step 3:
Customer
segmen-
tation
(prioritize)
∂
Step 4:
Customer
level
(optimize)
À
Technology
channel and
infrastructure
management
Step 1:
Customer
data aware
∂
Step 2:
Personal-
ization
(monetize) ∂
Step 3:
Automation
(prioritize)
∂
Step 4:
Intelligent
customer
process level
objectives
(optimize)
À
Technical
and com-
munication
management
Step 1:
Treatment
analysis
(analyze) ∂
Step 2:
Piecemeal
personal-
ization
(monetize)
∂
Step 3:
Treatment
X channel
X customer
(prioritize)
∂
Step 4:
Continuous
treatment
improve-
ment
(optimize)
À
Human
performance
management
Step 1:
Subjective
productivity
performance
∂
Step 2:
Qualitative +
quantitative
performance
(monetize)
∂
Step 3:
Customer-
based
performance
reviews
portfolios
(prioritize)
∂
Step 4:
Gain share
performance
compensa-
tion
(optimize)
The CRM label includes everything from call center systems to predic-
tive modeling and data marts. The smartest firms and consultants have
pieced together solutions, frameworks, and methodologies. They have writ-
ten books and guides, and they have conducted endless sessions on best
practices and proven methods. Still, customers are dissatisfied.
Of course, the breadth of what is classified and sold as CRM is part of
the problem. CRM is just too unwieldy. But the biggest issue has to do with
projects that are initiated with little regard for how a customer’s experience
will change after the investment. What will be different the next time the
customer makes a phone call? What will be different when the customer

172 customer worthy
visits a store or website, opens an envelope, or uses the product or service?
The result of the customer’s changed contact should be the single, clear
objective of each CRM investment. Will the contact generate more revenue?
Will it cost less but achieve the same level of revenue, or neither? Figure 12.5
illustrates CRM maturity stages that apply to both business-to-consumer
companies and business-to-business companies across most industries.
Use the CxC Matrix to visualize CRM
Most business managers and executives are overly polite when it comes to
discussing CRM. It sounds foolish to say out loud, “We are not concerned
with customer management.” Once, when working with a major telecommu-
nications firm, I was asked to meet with a group of the company’s regional
presidents and their CRM team. The company had spent nearly $150 million
on CRM technology and a multiple of its technology investment on imple-
mentation and training over the prior two years. I was invited to discuss
“CRM Strategy” and to help them answer, “What went wrong and how to
fix it.” After introductions, we started the meeting with a simple question
directed to each of seven presidents, “What did you expect would be differ-
ent after CRM’s successful launch?”
While each answer was slightly different, they all circled around cost
reduction, improved customer satisfaction, improved customer performance
visibility, and faster/less expensive problem resolution. The information and
technology participants and the external consultants responsible for the
project had slightly different answers. However, neither group answered
based on what the customer would experience differently the day after the
successful launch.
You can’t manage what you can’t see
To get everyone to agree on a definition of CRM, I sketched out a rough 15 X 6
CxC Matrix drawing on the large whiteboard. I quickly explained that each

cell represented a customer contact point across the buying stage and each
row represented a channel category. Then came the big question. “Which
cells did you expect to impact with your CRM initiative?”
This was the most uncomfortable part of the meeting by far. The head of
information technology came to the front of the room and put X’s in boxes
under “care and support, repair, collection and delivery” and declared, “That
is what was in scope.”
The rest of the group sat quietly and stared at the empty space in the
remaining 83 cells.
“The purpose of a company is to create a customer . . . The only profit center
is the customer . . . Therefore the business has two—and only two—basic
functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce
results: all the rest are costs.”
—Peter F. Drucker
CRM“Think Like a Customer”deliverables
Visualize: Total customer experience, customer performance by
department, customer handling and communication procedures.
Analyze: Resource allocation, customer flow and routing alterna-
tives, resource capabilities match to market needs by contact,
contact resource fitness.
Monetize: Customer activity cost, resource costs, customer poten-
tial, opportunity costs.
Prioritize: At-risk customers, customer defection points, unde-
rused contacts, customer bottlenecks, customer growth areas,
resources, alternative sources.
Optimize: Customer value, internal customer communication
processes.
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Marketing Feeds Matrix Slots Contact by Contact
The CxC Treatment Map
The CxC Treatment Map exposes the most granular level of the CxC Matrix:
the messages and rules executed at each slot in each customer contact. Fill-
ing the slots is most often the responsibility of your marketing department.
Your marketing department likely manages advertising messages through
an agency, sales, corporate relations, vendor relations and service messages
through those respective departments all of which are coordinated and cho-
reographed to sustain the company’s brand value and profit margin.
The Treatment Map evaluates how well each contact meets your cor-
porate objectives. It can identify opportunities for improvements and can
uncover misalignments between customer needs, business objectives and
actual treatments.
The Treatment Map verbally walks through the current and potential
treatments and encourages participation from all of the related departments
and third parties. Again, each scenario and component is monetized using
actual or estimated values in order to test and build the best performing
customer experience solutions.
Companies using marketing automation systems, marketing resource
management, campaign management, offer management and advanced
contact management systems likely have the essential tools and know how
to extend these systems capabilities to the broader task of managing slots
and treatments across the entire breadth of the CxC Matrix. The Treatment
Map fosters collaboration across multiple departments and disciplines to
create an unparalleled transparency to the customer experience for all of
the parties responsible for creating, hosting, transacting, measuring, and
modeling each contact and contact stream.
Treatment Map Example
The CxC Matrix Treatment Map sample excerpt that follows depicts the
company’s current treatments and contact delivery systems, channels, man-
agers, objectives, and system capabilities. Each cell in the Matrix Treatment

Map has a corresponding monetization formula that tracks the cost and
potential revenue projected for each treatment and treatment combina-
tion.
Figure 12.6
Channel/
medium
Response
channel
Systems Personalization? Disposition Current
treatment
Current
segmentation
Direct mail
Print
Email
Web ads
Internet website yes, using script and
dept. designed rules
place order configure
order,
accept
customer offer
by channel
DR-TV abandon order volume
dependent
customer offer
by channel
do-not-contact
request
add to DNC
list
customer offer
by channel
Direct mail
Web ads
Print
phone agent web-
based order
entry
yes, using script and
dept. designed rules
do-not-contact
request
add to DNC
list
customer offer
by channel
Direct mail
Print
DR-TV
mail order
management
none (batch input) do-not-contact
request
add to DNC
list
customer offer
by channel
DR-TV phone agent order
management
none (batch input) do-not-contact
request
add to DNC
list
customer offer
by channel
Potential
segmentation
Segment Objective Immediate
treatments
Follow-up
treatments
Offer code, order info,
product, survey, real-
time enhancement,
“likely-to-buy-x zip
code” model, Predictive
Model set, credit card
authorization, customer
history, pay method,
do-not-call
high attrition risk retain, reduce
cost
credit card, reject order,
alternate offer
low attrition risk up-sell, loyalty up-sell offer, survey,
MGM, sample
credit auth reject sell request other card or
check
exclusion list?
back order retain offer alternative, notify notify, offer alterna-
tive, offer consolation
gift
(same as above) refusals sell send info, alternate
offer, catalog, sample
new offer, catalog,
third-party offer,
newsletter, event
notices
offer code, geography,
real time calculation
high potential sell find contact preference new offer?
low potential reduce cost exclusion list
(same as above) (same as above) (same as above) none (batch process) outbound contacts
(same as above) (same as above) (same as above) meet objections, accept
order, send literature
outbound contacts

176 customer worthy
CxC Matrix Treatment Map Deliverables
Visualize: Advertising, Brand exposures, advertising campaigns,
interdepartmental customer messaging
Analyze: Channel spend allocation, competitor messaging and
channel execution, treatment execution turnaround time, execu-
tion and measurement systems, internal versus third party
capabilities, creative vs. offer vs. list vs. channel, cost benefit of
continuous treatment optimization
Monetize: media spend, channel spend, brand impact, commu-
nication design, agency tactics, margin lift, contact technology
enhancements, market segments.
Prioritize: Media, contact points, message combinations
Optimize: Media spend, agency spend, offer execution, cam-
paigns, sales, service and marketing initiatives
Marketing Performance Measurement
In an era when marketers are increasingly asked to prove the value of their
efforts, those who lack a complete view of all customer contacts cannot be
sure that they have considered all possibilities when deciding on marketing
strategy. They cannot accurately compare the costs and benefits of differ-
ent opportunities to be sure they are spending money effectively. The CxC
Matrix gives them this view.
Matrix data is purposely designed for automation, predictive analysis,
and business simulation. It creates a means and structure for continuous
performance improvement and provides a framework for observation and
experimentation.
Digitized data generated by customer transactions and interactions,
combined with product and service use information, can be used to dra-
matically alter business decisions. Given enough parameters, systems can
•
•
•
•
•

estimate what an individual customer can do and factor that assessment
against what similar customers in similar situations did. This makes cus-
tomer behavior more predictable and actionable. More importantly, it cre-
ates an analytical construct that accelerates company learning and reduces
discovery time. Capturing this complexity requires a disciplined mapping
process. The CxC Matrix starts with the set of contact points available to
your company based on how it advertises, sells, delivers, and services its
products. Although large, this data set is finite.
Automate what works—Continuous and Automatic Selling
With multiple sales, service, and communications programs running, cus-
tomers responding through multiple channels (phone, in-store, and website),
and customers at various stages of purchase, there is too much information
for any person or department to manage. By the time a marketing man-
ager examines the results of any aspect of the program in detail, tens of
other programs have been launched, and thousands of contacts have been
spawned across multiple channels.
Figure 12.7 Relative Need for Automated Rules
Decision volume
lowhigh
high very high
low high
low high
Decision complexity
Continuous and Automatic Selling (CAS), applies proven direct marketing
testing and analysis principles to each individual customer contact. It does
this by using business rules to determine the elements served to each slot,
container and slot, and container combinations.

178 customer worthy
At its simplest, the CAS constantly tests the current elements versus
potential alternative elements until the challenger out-performs the base,
“Offer A,” in the example below.
When the “challenger” out-performs the base, the challenger replaces
the base, and a new challenger from the “Test” or pending challenger set
replaces the “Challenger.”
This practice, while not commonplace, is used extensively on websites
that dynamically present offers and content based on a visitor’s (customer’s)
profile data (if registered), website navigation path, click stream, geographic
location, and any other accessible data.
Companies are using similar methods to dynamically construct emails
to customers who identify their preferences and Matrix consumer stage to
assemble each email’s contents: messages, offers, colors, graphics, follow-up
channels, pricing, contact instructions, and partner offers.
Figure 12.8 Continuous Contact Optimization
1.Awareness
2.Information
3.Identification
4.Selection
5.Negotiation
6.Contract
7.Logistics
8.Delivery
9.Acceptance
10.$Collection
11.Use
12.Care/Support
13.Repair
14.Disposal
15.Community
Geography
Digital
Location
Third party
One-on-one
Community
Offer A Challenger
Offer B
Test A
i.e., offer,
message,
product,
graphics
Control
Test B

Figure 12.9 Making Contacts Manageable and Observable
While early adopters and technically sophisticated companies may seek
to quickly optimize every possible contact in each channel at each Matrix
stage, this is a very expensive and complex proposition. It is also not likely
to be necessary to achieve the majority of the revenue and profits available
through optimizing performance in a few strategically selected channels. It
is also worth noting that, as evidenced in the following example, additional
capital generates higher returns when directed at increasing the frequency
and complexity of current offers, products, and messages. This requires more
people and more creative service and product offerings. It generates more
to talk about and more people to create stories.
Best story wins!
A highly successful company that had experienced a 20 percent annual
growth rate for a number of years—primarily due to leveraging web and
Internet channels in combination with their traditional channels—found
that it needed to expand its staff of copywriters from two or three people
per line of business to 20 or 30 per line of business. This was the only way
that it could meet the demands of constantly constructing new offers, new
messages, and various pricing and marketing techniques.

180 customer worthy
Did it pay off? Yes. Growth expanded to over 30 percent year over year
in a highly competitive market, and some individual lines of business grew
profits in excess of 50 percent. Profits grew due to the reduced cycle time
in identifying winning programs and reducing the wasted expense of under-
performing and failed programs that atrophied in the market.
The high-profit, high-growth company’s CEO, who has an account-
ing background, made substantial investments in performance manage-
ment systems technology. He empowered his chief technology officer and
chief operations officer to invest in systems and processes that provided
quick, efficient, and flexible execution of dynamically changing offers and
products.
His ultimate success came from their managers with a set of metrics
and reports available in near real time and showed the value of nearly every
element of each contact. Every manager was encouraged to monitor yield
per offer, yield per customer, lifetime customer value, and yield per contact,
including cross-sales, up-sells, and referrals. Sales by customer were also
monitored but, more importantly, were valued for their internal cross-sell
potential.
His mantra was, “Best Story Wins,” and he set up a customer infrastruc-
ture capable of identifying, which stories were best performing. He provided
managers with the tools to continuously manufacture, monitor, test, and
execute the “best stories,” sales propositions, and customer experiences in
their chosen markets.
Marketing Performance CxC Matrix deliverables
Visualize: Brand impressions, competitors messaging strategy;
messaging flow for new versus existing customers' marketing;
sales, communications strategies; geographic/competitor specific
messaging strategy; communications plan; product lifecycle;
consumer lifecycle; innovation vulnerability; style book.
•

Analyze: Potential customer revenue by life stage; customer
profitability ranges per contact combinations; customer value
performance algorithm; market simulation; promotion simula-
tion; market disruption simulation; merger and acquisitions, new
market entry; product launch; product/service discontinuation;
management hypothetical simulations; war room analysis.
Monetize: Customer data elements, process and resource attri-
butes, mergers and acquisitions, new market potential, price
change impact, service alternatives, market components, com-
petitors and partners pricing, distribution, and profitability.
Prioritize: Performance outliers that indicate high business risk
and untapped revenue potential; keystone consumer cycle events
and tactics; markets, products, customers.
Optimize: Customer potential algorithm performance; slot and
contact component combinations; market observation data and
criteria; decisioning cycle time support; and tools for all manage-
ment.
How you can use the CxC Matrix today
Your company’s version of the CxC Matrix, channels by customer stage,
should be clear in every decision-maker’s mind and readily available at every
manager’s disposal to depict how any business decision will affect custom-
ers and potential upstream and downstream corporate impacts. How and
where does this decision impact customers? How many customers of which
segments will be affected? Which channels are best suited to introduce an
offer, change, or announcement to customers?
The CxC Matrix is meant to depict the obvious but often overlooked chan-
nels and vehicles for conveying messages to customers. The same Matrix
•
•
•
•

182 customer worthy
that was used at the planning stage can be used post decision to assess the
accuracy of the assumptions made at the time of the decision.
A simple Matrix should become part of managers’ project proposals to
delineate the anticipated impact on customers by life stage and contact
point. Will the proposed project grow customer flow? Reduce customer flow
to specific contact points? Grow or reduce revenue and costs at specific
contact points?
Ongoing Matrix uses
Most companies have reporting capabilities whereby they can create stan-
dard management reports using the CxC Matrix design and principles,
reporting on customer flow and customer value across departments and
systems on a quarterly, monthly, daily, or near term basis.
The Matrix is designed to provide an enterprise view of customer perfor-
mance and as such is often fed data from a number of disparate internal and
external systems. The company’s requirements for level of Matrix detail and
the frequency of reporting dictates the amount of design and programming
resource required. Department and function specific CxC Matrix reporting
and systems can be designed and launched using internal resources or a
combination of external resources, hosted reporting services, and any num-
ber of hybrid resource configurations.
Advanced CxC Matrix future applications:
The customer algorithm
As products and services become smarter and require less direct human
intervention, customer contacts, product operation, and messaging will
become more automated and programmable. Like Neil’s story at the begin-
ning of Customer Worthy, where his town’s recreation commission publishes
a message to his car’s dashboard to register his children for spring baseball,
messages will seek out customers through the best available channel as

determined by a complex set of rules orchestrated to adapt your company’s
objectives to the customer’s preferences, value and context.
In Neil’s situation, his car was parked in a municipal lot and his family car
was identified and recognized by its registration and Neil’s digital footprint,
which recognized that Neil’s car was capable of and approved for receiving
messages from the municipality.
This scenario highlights not only the use of advanced message design
and communication technologies connected to customer profile databases
and transaction systems, but also device-to-device interactivity where Neil’s
phone, laptop, and car are all “aware” and connected to the transaction, with
the proximity of his laptop and phone providing sufficient authentication
for the bank transaction to complete. Furthermore, the electronic payment
transaction initiated when Neil said, “confirm,” is likely captured and veri-
fied on the municipality’s systems and executed between Neil’s financial
institution and the municipality directly.
Neil’s successful transaction and all the steps in the transaction are also
used to help the new system learn the best process route to conduct similar
transactions for Neil and people like Neil in the future.
Again, all of the information exchanges, rules, and even the exchange
of money and access to Neil’s bank account appeared effortless and mat-
ter-of-fact to Neil due to the execution of continuously learning customer
algorithms running in the background.
al·go·rithm (āl'gә-rĭth'әm) n. A step-by-step problem-solving procedure,
especially an established, recursive computational procedure for solving a
problem in a finite number of steps.
—The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language,
Fourth Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.
The customer algorithm is a customer-centric formula designed to con-
figure messages, activities and transactions to ensure customer convenience

184 customer worthy
and optimum service. In the future, the customer algorithm will be the “rules
center” surrounding the customer and working on behalf of the customer
to ensure that only customer-worthy messages are allowed access to the
customer’s network.
While the customer algorithm governs access to customers on the cus-
tomer’s behalf, companies will continue to evolve their own algorithm—the
culmination of all of the elements described in the CxC Matrix connecting
advertising, sales, marketing, finance, legal, service, and operations.
Figure 12.10
The CxC Matrix Algorithm is the mathematical expression of the probable
success of each element in a contact to move the customer to the next con-
sumer life stage factored by the customer’s potential to buy anything over a
specified period of time. Conversely, the CxC Matrix Algorithm is also used
to calculate a customer’s probability of never buying anything or failing to
exceed a value threshold over the lifetime of the customer’s relationship.
The elements required to construct this algorithm are available today
as described in the CxC Matrix walk-through earlier in the book. Since a
great number of contact elements are not yet digitized, the effort and cost

to build and execute the CxC Matrix Algorithm outweighs the near term
benefit except in explicitly digital channels like web-based ecommerce. As
more messages become digitized and they grow their understanding of cus-
tomer processes, customer networks and customer performance companies
will move use of the CxC Matrix Algorithm from analytical and simulation
modeling applications to real time advertising, sales, service, transaction,
and communications applications.
For now, the CxC Matrix Algorithm is particularly useful in depicting
customer contact scenarios as simulations to test and estimate the potential
value of alternative business strategies, tactics, environmental scenarios,
and competitive scenarios.
Leveraging the gaming skills of new work force
The CxC Matrix Algorithm enables companies that have completed a thor-
ough CxC Matrix and CxC Matrix Treatment Map to efficiently experiment
with alternative strategies and tactics in a manner similar to a role-based
video game where multiple parties can collaborate and compete to build
best outcome or highest scoring opportunities. Companies can evaluate
the costs and benefits of new market entries, new product lines, mergers
and acquisitions, and new product and service features from a customer
performance perspective.
Customer ignorance is not an option
Companies that lack customer performance knowledge and foresight will
(expensively) pursue the wrong customers with the wrong messages deliv-
ered at the wrong time through the wrong channels.
Legacy management structures, reporting systems, analytical methods
and traditional decision making silos will not survive in this new competi-
tive frontier where the best prescribed offers are designed to laser target
customer’s specific needs and context while surgically eliminating competi-
tion from consideration.

186 customer worthy
In the current reality where almost any company can quickly replicate
another’s products and services and hijack its marketing message and value
propositions, you need to ensure your contacts are customer worthy at each
point that proves to be critical to growing customer value.
Every employee, partner, stakeholder, shareholder, and market influencer
must measure every business decision with the same single criteria: is it
customer worthy?

187
Index
A
alerts, 3, 22, 34, 57, 111–114, 147, 150,
158, 168
Amazon, 14–19, 79, 81, 102, 118–119,
125, 149
analyze, 19, 24, 103, 106–107, 145, 147,
152, 155, 158, 160, 164, 170, 171, 173,
176, 181
anonymous customers, 106
APQC, 71
artificial intelligence, xviii
awareness, 2, 29, 36, 38, 43, 48, 50–72, 97,
150, 166, 169
B
behavior monitoring, 19
billing statement, 22, 42–43, 74, 100
business ecosystem, 2
business objectives, 58
business processes, xix, 12, 154, 169
business risk exposure, 23
C
call-on-hold scripts, 67
channels, 7, 10, 18–20, 32, 34–35, 38,
40–44, 60, 63, 65, 73–75, 76–87, 90, 101,
104–105, 131, 148, 158, 160, 168, 174,
177,181, 185
collect, 88, 94
community, 36–43, 57, 64, 72, 75, 78–94,
166
customer algorithm, 182–185
customer mapping, 39–40
company processes, 152, 177
competitive advantage, xv, 11, 19, 191
consumer evolution, 7–8
consumer lifecycle, 10–11, 49, 107–108,
143, 154, 180–181
CustomerPayback, 121
Contact, xviii, 10–14
contact chaos, 23
contact management, 69–75, 140–145
contact objectives , 18, 29, 57–59, 90–97
contact value, 10, 14
container, 14, 32 (definition), 69, 89, 97,
104. 177
Continuous and Automatic Selling (CAS),
177
contract, 36, 38, 43–44, 49–50, 52, 57, 62,
72, 150
customer costs, xi

188 customer worthy
customer data management, 133, 151
customer expectations, 38, 55, 75, 85–91,
114, 117, 124, 137, 140
customer experience design, xiii, 1, 11
customer flow, 11–14, 59–60
customer payback.com, 110, 123
customer rage, 167
customer service, 91–93, 100, 106, 123,
133, 165–168, 170
customer-centric discussions, 54, 69, 143
customer-centric messages, 96, 142, 183
customer-to-company relationship, 90, 94
D-E-F
deliverables, 24, 107, 145, 148, 152, 155,
158, 160, 164, 170, 171, 173, 176, 180
department view, 53–58
digital, 140–141
digital communities, 85
Dyson, Esther, xvi
eBay, 37, 79, 81, 119, 127
educate customer, 94
Evil Twin (story), 3–6
expand relationship, 94
E-ZPass, 88
financial measures, 12, 68, 147
forecasting, 67–68
G-H-I-J
generate referrals, 95
Google, 15, 51, 67, 81, 101
identity theft, 129, 133, 137
J.D. Power, xiii, 165
L-M
lifetime value, 108–109
logistics, 9, 154
message types, 95–102
affiliation, 101
behavioral , 98
commercialization, 100–101
demographic, 97
geographic, 97
personalization, 98–99
predictive model, 99–100
syndication, 101–102
monetize, 14–15, 24, 60–65, 103, 108–109,
121–122, 145, 147, 152, 156, 158, 160,
164, 170, 171, 173, 176, 181
N-O-P
National Retail Federation, 71
need, shop, buy scenario, 96
Net Promoter Score, xiii, 97, 143
operations, 56–58, 67, 100, 153–155
optimize, 24, 89, 103, 110, 145, 148, 152,
156, 158, 161, 164, 170, 171, 173, 176,
179, 181
Pareto Principle, xiii
personal data aggregators, 42, 57, 78, 96,
150
Ponemon Institute, 137
predictive modeling, 68, 95, 99–100, 111,
147, 171, 175
prioritize, 15, 24, 103, 109–110, 145, 148,
152, 156, 158, 160, 164, 170, 171, 173,
176, 181
privacy, 2, 8–9, 119, 128–138
public relations, 23
S-T-U
silos, 21–22, 185
situational awareness, 166
Six Sigma, 71

Index 189
slots, 14
Strategy+Business, xvi
system view, 55–56
targeting, 95
Think Like a Customer, 10–11, 17, 20,
25–60, 105
third parties, 7–8, 83–87, 100–105, 128,
133
transparency, 2, 112, 115, 117, 138,
143–147
treatment map, 141, 174–176, 185
trusted advertising, 76
trusted companies, 2
visualize, 24, 103, 104, 145, 147, 152, 155,
158, 160, 164, 170, 172, 173, 176, 180

191
About the Author
Michael R. Hoffman is a pioneer in monetizing
customers and customer experience. He has spent
more than 20 years working with global data and
technology companies helping them design and
sell systems to help companies better understand,
target, win, and grow customers.
Mr. Hoffman speaks the language of sales, operations, finance and tech-
nology all with a customer dialect. His “customers are everyone’s business”
approach invigorates employees across a company spurring innovation,
enthusiasm and a contagious passion to build, sell and deliver customer
worthy solutions.
Mr. Hoffman’s knowledge comes from years spent in front of customers
and board rooms, within customer technology development skunk works,
and inside multi-thousand cubicle customer contact centers. He shows
companies how to gain unfair competitive advantage leveraging customer
information to design, execute and measure superior customer worthy solu-
tions.
In 2004, he launched Client x Client, LLC, a consulting firm specializing
in marketing technology, customer relationship management (CRM), and
strategy. His model for optimizing customer value is the basis for Customer
Worthy: Why and How Everyone in Your Organization Must Think Like A Cus-
tomer. He is a frequent speaker and author for the marketing, sales, CRM
and technology industries and trade magazines.

192 customer worthy
His prior experience includes executive positions at Google (formerly
DoubleClick), Sitel (formerly ClientLogic), Experian, and marketing technol-
ogy start-ups. His diverse clients and partnerships include well-known estab-
lishments in the retail, banking, insurance, non-profit, telecommunications,
publishing, travel, technology, services, and entertainment industries. His
CxC Matrix is used by both business-to-consumer and business-to-business
enterprises.
Mr. Hoffman is a graduate of LaSalle University and did post-graduate
work at New York University and Seton Hall University. He lives in Basking
Ridge, New Jersey.

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