How often do you only look at company-generated marketing material when making a significant purchase decision? If you're like most of us, you use multiple sources, including referrals, reviews, magazines, and others' experiences before you make any decisions about purchases.

This means that companies are no longer in control of information that is circulated about their products and services. This change in the customers' information sources is only one example of the dramatically different business landscape that businesses operate in today.

A shift has occurred in the way that customers make their decisions (from trusting companies to using online consumer-generated info), where customers are located (from primarily local to global), and how we deliver our services (from a purely in-sourced to a multi-outsourced model and outsourcing suppliers and business processes).

Virtually every aspect of the way business operates has changed over the last three-to-four years and companies are now struggling to catch up and reinvent their own models to address the new networked consumer we have to deal with.

Although companies have spent time, money, and energy addressing the changes enabled by the IT revolution in supply chain, e-commerce, and vendor outsourcing, one area left untouched is addressing the changes in the way customers make decisions and access information. This is particularly obvious in how companies fail to address the conversations that customers have with each other. By ignoring these conversations, they find that customers go elsewhere for information, and by the time they arrive to do business, they are armed with information from other customers and reviewers and pre-conceived assumptions about what you do and how you do it.

In this world of social networks and self-publication conversations about your company, your products, and your people occur anywhere and everywhere. We see companies reacting how you'd expect: entering social networks because it's the thing to do.

To be successful, customer-focused organizations have to participate in every aspect of the customer conversation. Whether it's on blogs or social network sites, or somewhere else, the most important thing is to allow customers to communicate with you as easily as they communicate with each other. Companies need to get beyond feeling that conversations with customers are an incremental cost and are complaint-related, and begin embracing the voice of the customer beyond marketing messaging.

The only way to manage the shift and build credibility with the customer base is to show a complete approach to not only collecting but also distributing the information so employees can do something with it that benefits the customer. This is not setting up a company Facebook page because you think it will be meaningful to a certain segment of your customers. If companies are truly to manage the shift that is associated with the networking of customers, they need to look for sophisticated systems that are enterprise focused that allow them to listen, participate, engage and delight customs on a real-time all the time basis.

Customers want to provide feedback any where, and everywhere about anything. They don't want to be surveyed; they want to be listened to. True customer experience management involves putting listening posts throughout your customer lifecycle, integrating these listening posts to the business processes that deliver products and services, and empowering your people to participate with customers on a weekly, daily, and in the best case, hourly basis. Without a significant change in mindset, organizations will continue to struggle to gain the trust and access the information that customers are willing to share.

For more information, email us with SHIFT in the subject line.