Book of the Week – Built to Win

No business can succeed without its valued customers. Annette Franz, founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc., will teach you and your team the importance of placing the customer first. In “Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture that Drives Value for Your Business,” Franz uses her internationally recognized experience as a Certified Customer Experience Professional to explain the principles you need to become a five-star review business.

What is your book about?

Customer-centric companies put the customer at the center of all they do. They ensure that they make no decisions without first thinking of the customer, and the impact that decision has on her. But what does it take to ensure that the entire company adopts this mindset, this culture?

In Built to Win, learn about the ten critical principles that form the foundation for building such a culture. Build the business with these principles in mind, and you will build to win. Win for the customer, win for the business.

Topics include:

There are 10 key defining foundational principles that ensure that customer-centricity is an enterprise-wide approach to doing business. These principles are the framework upon which this book is based and the framework upon which a winning organization must be built.

1. Culture is the foundation.
2. Leadership commitment and alignment are critical to success.
3. Employee experience: employees must be put more first.
4. People come before products.
5. People come before profits.
6. People come before metrics.
7. Customer understanding is the cornerstone.
8. Governance bridges organizational gaps.
9. Outside-in thinking and doing vs. inside-out thinking and doing are core.
10. The Platinum Rule rules.

Why should people read it? Who is the book for?

This book is mostly for company executives and leaders (including board members—yes, culture must be important to your board!), but it’s also for others who want to help executives and leaders understand what being customer-centric means, why it’s important and how to build the business case for building a winning organization where the customer is at the heart of all you do.

The point is to help you, the reader, be inspired to act, to think differently and to want to build a customer-centric organization that drives value for all constituents, not the least of which is the business itself.

Single most important takeaway:

A customer-centric organization is one where there are no discussions, no decisions and no designs without bringing in the customer and their voice (that’s the understanding piece), without asking how it will impact the customer, how it will make them feel, what problems it will help them to solve and what value it will create and deliver for them.

Meet the author

With 30 years in the customer experience profession, Annette Franz, CCXP, founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc., is an internationally recognized customer experience thought leader, coach, keynote speaker and author of Customer Understanding: Three Ways to Put the “Customer” in Customer Experience (and at the Heart of Your Business) and Built to Win: Designing a Customer-Centric Culture That Drives Value for Your Business. She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) and an official member of the Forbes Coaches Council.