Who Speaks for the Customer?: Improving Results with a Customer Centered Framework

Who Speaks for the Customer? uniquely focuses on raising the customer’s voice to the strategic level by linking the customer experience to business economics. It also illustrates how businesses can improve their bottom line and succeed by providing outstanding customer experience while still creating a solid profit. The book explores both the theory and the practical foundation to change into or build a customer-centered business that can help transform companies. It is written with the intent of helping business leaders achieve good financial results by leveraging core success factors. Through this process, all of us who are customers might just benefit from a better business experience as well!

Successful businesses change and adapt regularly. Change is often inspired by external market factors, such as economic downturns, globalization, politics, pandemics, new technology including AI, and disruptive competitive practices. Businesses are driven to make a profit, and they operate with an internal focus to create and execute strategy that drives the ＂bottom line.＂ In practice, this often happens at the expense of good customer experience. Companies that take a longer-term strategic view and understand how to include customer experience in their strategy can perform better and achieve more profit than those that focus their strategy primarily on product or market trends or technology. We live in a business era where technology is integral, AI is influencing interactions, personalization is expected, and shifts in generational preferences are changing the way we work and communicate. What used to be ＂good enough＂ as a customer experience can now put a company out of business. Customer experience is essential for a company to succeed, but most executives and managers lack a full understanding of what that means for their business.

The subscription business model is prevalent in many sectors. Unfortunately, business school curriculum and most legacy businesses do not understand the economics behind these overarching shifts in how business is operated. Businesspeople are unaware of how customer-centered strategy can positively impact this current business environment, and they often choose not to prioritize it. They don’t recognize how directly it impacts their bottom line. The information in this book provides existing executives, managers, and those who are studying business with techniques that have the proven potential to change how businesses operate, improve customer experience, and positively impact financial success.

Irene F. Lefton is a writer, top 100 Customer Success (CS) Strategist, CS Advocate, former VP of Customer Success and Chief Customer Officer who conveys the voice of the customer. She focuses on balancing good customer experience and creating customer value to drive profitable recurring revenue. Her background in economics and business spans many industries and use cases, and she has successfully built and operated multiple global professional services, support, and CS teams in the US, Europe and Asia.

Irene demonstrates customer focus in everything she does. She currently leads the Customer Success Leadership Network, a collaborative group of cross-functional executives that network, share ideas and educate others about the importance of centering customers in business. With a degree in Economics and an MBA from the University of NM, Irene has garnered expertise over her career by working around the world, in both large and small companies and has demonstrated success across multiple go to market business models, perpetual and subscription.

She is considered to be a thought leader in the Customer Experience/Customer Success space, and she consults to develop and execute strategies that ensure practices and policies are customer centered. Growing up in a small family retail business, Irene actively built her early career in Los Angeles where she held roles in project management at Transamerica Insurance, did consulting and implementation of large-scale government systems at Price Waterhouse, and created IT and logistics infrastructure at a regional grocery wholesaler. She moved to Silicon Valley to lead regional consulting practices at Amdahl and Progress Software and has managed many customer facing teams at other enterprises where she was an early innovator in the emerging field of Customer Success.

The latter part of her career was spent wearing multiple executive hats, and honing her customer focused change management, communication, escalation, and facilitation skills. She chose early-stage companies where she navigated the chaos to bring order to customers and created and contributed to successful exits, and acquisitions. Irene’s resiliency and the experience she gained throughout her career provides her with a unique perspective on how to leverage customer input and knowledge and create sustainable and profitable businesses. She understands how to help companies adapt to cultural and generational differences from managing multi-generational global teams and experiencing both subscription and perpetual business models.