Breaking Through: Implementing Disruptive Customer Centricity

Customer centricity is fundamental to business growth and ongoing success. Most executives appreciate the importance of it yet don’t know how to execute it or sell the processes internally. This thoroughly revised edition of Breaking Through guides readers systematically through the ten breakthrough points of implementation, to explain how to execute a transformation to customer centricity, so that a company can engage continuously with its customers, making them allies and advocates with all the rewards that it brings. With updates on digital opportunities, social media, emerging markets (including Africa), and the social as well as financial impacts of customer centricity, this book successfully blends strategy with implementation and also features a range of innovative new and traditional business examples from across the globe. Easy to read, in-depth and full of practical advice, this is the essential step-by-step guide to implementing customer centricity to endure in the long-term.

Sandra Vandermerwe is a best-selling author who has worked as a consultant alongside senior management and boards for a range of private public and NGO enterprises in the field of customer centric transformation more recently specializing in emerging market innovation. Her ideas and methodologies have been implemented widely by enterprises globally.

Her academic work is based on application driven research and collaboration with well-known thinkers and practitioners and has been published by leading academic journals. Her cases have won several awards two of which were cited in 2013 by the European Case Clearing House as among the top 40 best sellers in its 40 year history. Sandra has been a key note speaker at global conferences and at a variety of senior executive development programs at business schools around the globe.

From 1996 to 2006, she had a chair at Imperial College Business School, University of London in the UK and for a decade prior to that, was a Professor at IMD Lausanne Switzerland. Currently she is an Extraordinary Professor at Gordon Institute of Business Studies (GIBS), University of Pretoria, South Africa, an Associate Fellow at Imperial College Business School London an Adjunct Professor at European School of Management and Technology (ESMT) Germany and a Senior Associate with Deloitte Consulting.