Build For Change

Build For Change Plot Summary

Introduction

The business landscape is undergoing a seismic shift driven by a new generation of digitally empowered customers. This transformation threatens the very existence of companies that fail to adapt their customer engagement strategies. At the core of this revolution is a fundamental power reversal: customers now control the relationship, not businesses. The traditional methods of customer relationship management are becoming increasingly ineffective as Generation C and especially the emerging Generation D customers wield unprecedented influence through digital technologies. These new customers reject being sold to, managed, or manipulated. They expect seamless experiences across all channels, demand authentic interactions, and can instantly broadcast their dissatisfaction to millions. Companies must revolutionize how they think about data, intent, process, technology, and organizational structure to survive what the author terms the "customerpocalypse." The journey ahead requires nothing less than a complete transformation in how businesses operate—moving from inside-out to outside-in thinking, democratizing technology, thinking in layers, and embracing continuous optimization through analytics.

Chapter 1: The Customerpocalypse: How Gen D Customers Are Reshaping Business

A dramatic shift is occurring in the business world that threatens the survival of many established companies. This shift is driven by the emergence of Generation D customers, who are fundamentally changing the rules of customer engagement. Unlike previous generations, Gen D customers don't simply dislike poor service—they actively seek to punish companies that fail to meet their expectations. Generation D evolved from Generation C (for Content), the digital natives who grew up with personal computers and the internet. While Gen C might complain about poor service, Gen D goes further—they "discover, devour, or demonize" businesses. They reject being "sold to" and instead insist on discovering products and services on their own terms. When they connect with a brand, they identify with it completely—the brand becomes part of their identity. However, when disappointed, they don't merely walk away; they launch aggressive social media campaigns that can inflict serious damage on a company's reputation. What makes Gen D particularly dangerous to traditional business models is their complete rejection of being managed or controlled. They expect businesses to anticipate their needs while maintaining the illusion that they are discovering solutions independently. They demand radical authenticity and transparency, yet become hostile when they sense they're being tracked or manipulated. Companies like Netflix and Microsoft have already faced backlash when they attempted to influence customer behavior in ways Gen D perceived as controlling. The power dynamic has completely reversed. Companies once "owned" customers; now they must hope customers will choose to "own" them. This shift is evident in how Gen D views privacy and data. While they share intimate details of their lives on social media, they become resentful when companies use that information for marketing purposes. The line is crossed when Gen D perceives a company is profiting from their information without providing proportional value in return. Companies that fail to adapt to this new reality face extinction. Brands like Circuit City, Borders, and Nokia have already disappeared because they failed to listen to changing customer demands. The path to survival requires understanding that control has shifted to the customer, and businesses must learn to engage on the customer's terms—with authenticity, transparency, and a commitment to delivering value without apparent manipulation.

Chapter 2: The Limitations of Data-Driven Customer Approaches

The data obsession that dominates modern business strategy can actually destroy customer relationships when misapplied. Companies have accumulated vast troves of customer information, believing that more data automatically leads to better customer understanding. However, this approach frequently leads to disastrous decisions and alienated customers. Consider First Chicago Bank's attempt to charge customers $2 to speak with human representatives, hoping to drive them toward automated systems. The strategy backfired spectacularly, contributing to the bank's demise. Similarly, many airlines implemented baggage fees both to increase revenue and discourage behavior that increased fuel costs—a strategy that damaged customer relationships. These misguided decisions stem from over-reliance on cost data without considering the full context of customer relationships. The fundamental problem is that data represents only the past—it is memory, not judgment or desire. Data tells you who the customer was, not who they might become or what they truly want. Even with the most comprehensive "360-degree view" of customer data, companies still lack the context needed to make appropriate decisions. The data might show what a customer purchased, but not why, or how they wish to be treated in the future. Big Data compounds these challenges rather than solving them. As businesses accumulate increasingly massive datasets, they often become overwhelmed by information without gaining proportional insight. This leads to what might be called "data suicide"—companies drowning in information while missing obvious trends and customer desires. Sony exemplifies this failure by focusing on internal data while ignoring the digital music revolution, allowing Apple to completely disrupt their market position. Perhaps most dangerously, excessive data collection without proper context leads to creepy customer interactions. When Target identified a teenage girl as pregnant through purchase pattern analysis and sent baby-related coupons to her home—before her father knew of the pregnancy—they crossed a line that Generation D finds particularly offensive. Such incidents demonstrate how easily data-driven approaches can alienate customers when divorced from appropriate judgment and sensitivity. The path forward isn't abandoning data but supplementing it with something crucial: intent. Companies must move beyond simply knowing who their customers are to understanding why they engage and what they truly desire. Only by combining data (memory) with intent (desire moderated by judgment) can businesses create the foundation for meaningful customer relationships that will survive in the age of Generation D.

Chapter 3: Balancing Data with Intent: Adding Judgment to Customer Intelligence

Moving beyond raw data requires integrating judgment and desire into customer intelligence. While data alone resembles a black-and-white photograph of past behavior, adding intent transforms this into a vivid, full-color image that reveals deeper patterns and possibilities. Intent comprises both the customer's goals and preferences and the business's objectives for engagement—creating a bidirectional relationship that enriches every interaction. Judgment allows businesses to interpret data meaningfully rather than mechanically. Consider a credit card company that notices identical charges on a customer's statement. Data alone simply flags a duplicate; judgment helps determine whether it's likely an error and proactively addresses it before the customer notices. This integration of data with judgment forms the foundation of next-best-action systems, which continually balance customer needs with business objectives to optimize each moment of engagement. Vodafone exemplifies this approach with its mobile phone customers. When customers reload their prepaid phones, they receive personalized "daily special" offers based on their actual usage patterns and predicted preferences. These offers achieve acceptance rates exceeding 50% because they genuinely align with customer intentions rather than merely pushing products. The success stems from Vodafone's deep understanding that customers expect their objectives to be known and respected. This approach requires moving beyond the scientific tradition of correlation to focus on causality through hypothesis testing. Rather than simply gathering more data, companies must propose hypotheses about what drives customer behavior and rigorously test these theories. PNC Bank implemented this approach through its Customer Interaction Management (CIM) system, which analyzes customer data in real-time to make next-best-action decisions that continuously improve through adaptive learning. Adaptive learning represents a virtuous circle that validates and refines predictive analysis over time. By constantly testing new hypotheses against millions of customer interactions, businesses can identify patterns that traditional data analysis would miss. This allows for dynamic optimization that adjusts to changing customer preferences without requiring perfect data—a critical capability in the fast-evolving digital landscape. Importantly, intent must flow both ways. While companies work to understand customer intentions, they must also give customers a consistent experience of their business. American Express transformed its customer service approach by empowering representatives with a "budget for satisfaction" that corresponds to each customer's value, enabling them to resolve issues authentically based on relationship context rather than rigid policies. This reciprocity principle ensures that customers experience the business as an entity with consistent values and intentions, regardless of the channel or touchpoint.

Chapter 4: Customer Processes: Building Seamless Engagement Across Channels

Effective customer engagement requires more than just data and intent—it demands muscle. Customer processes serve as this muscle, allowing businesses to operationalize insights and deliver consistent experiences across all touchpoints. These processes must be designed from the outside-in, viewing the business through the customer's eyes rather than through internal organizational structures. Customer processes differ fundamentally from traditional business processes. While business processes typically reflect internal departmental boundaries and organizational silos, customer processes transcend these artificial divisions to create seamless journeys. BB&T Bank demonstrated this transformation when redesigning its account opening experience. Previously, customers faced fragmented processes that varied by channel—starting an application online meant restarting from scratch if they later visited a branch. By reimagining the entire process from the customer's perspective, BB&T created a unified experience where information flowed seamlessly across channels, reducing application abandonment by half and slashing processing times from weeks to minutes. Prudential Group Insurance faced similar challenges with multiple lines of business creating disjointed customer experiences. With customer data housed in eight separate silos and staff distributed across multiple call centers, representatives struggled to provide coherent service. By building customer processes that mapped information to customer intentions, Prudential enabled any customer service associate to handle any call for any product, regardless of the traditional business line boundaries. This transformation delivered both improved customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. These customer processes must embody four essential principles to succeed. First, they must be seamless, eliminating disconnects between channels, departments, or product lines. Second, they must be dynamic, able to adapt to specific customer situations rather than forcing customers into rigid paths. Third, they must create persistent connections that maintain context across interactions. Finally, they must be fluid and evolvable, continuously adapting to changing business conditions and customer expectations. American Express exemplified these principles when transforming its customer service approach. Rather than viewing customer interactions as transactions to be completed efficiently, American Express redefined them as relationship opportunities. The company shifted from measuring average handling time to "customer handling time"—allowing the interaction to last as long as the customer needs. By training representatives to focus 70-80% on engagement rather than technical procedures, American Express created authentic connections that built loyalty and advocacy. The transition to true customer processes requires breaking down the mental barriers that divide organizations internally. It means recognizing that from the customer's perspective, your business is a single entity, not a collection of departments or channels. When designed correctly, customer processes make the technology and organizational structure invisible to customers, allowing them to engage naturally with the business on their terms—a critical requirement for surviving in the age of Gen D.

Chapter 5: Rethinking Technology for the Customer-Centric Enterprise

Technology lies at the heart of customer engagement transformation, yet most businesses remain trapped in outdated approaches to information technology that prevent them from meeting Gen D expectations. The fundamental disconnect between business and IT must be addressed through a complete reimagining of how technology is developed and deployed. Traditional technology development follows a "waterfall" model where business requirements are translated into design specifications, which are then laboriously coded over extended periods. This process creates multiple problems: "zombie systems" that stagnate because changes are too difficult to implement; "manual systems" developed as workarounds when official systems fail to meet needs; and "rogue systems" built by frustrated business users operating without IT support. Together, these dysfunctions prevent businesses from adapting quickly to changing customer expectations. The root cause lies in how computer programming evolved. Despite decades of advancement in programming languages, the fundamental paradigm remains unchanged—businesspeople must translate their needs to technical specialists who then create systems using languages and processes divorced from business thinking. Even modern languages like Java maintain this separation, requiring dedicated programmers to translate business requirements into code. Further complicating matters is the traditional portfolio management process that allocates IT resources. This process creates a culture of scarcity where business units compete for limited development capacity, leading to massive over-specification of requirements. Since most projects will never receive funding for updates or enhancements, business users attempt to include everything they might possibly need for years to come, creating bloated, inflexible systems. Proposed solutions like cloud computing or offshore development fail to address these fundamental issues. Moving development offshore simply relocates the same dysfunctional process, while cloud computing addresses infrastructure constraints but not the underlying development model. Even agile software development, while offering improvements in speed and collaboration, often remains subject to the same portfolio management constraints that prevent true business agility. The solution requires a radical shift in how technology is approached. Business and IT must forge a new relationship where technology becomes a means for businesspeople to directly express their intentions without translation. This requires moving beyond hand-coded software to systems that can generate code based on business specifications expressed in business language. It means abandoning the traditional development cycle in favor of continuous, incremental enhancement driven by business needs. Technology must become a first-class business capability rather than a support function—what Forrester Research calls the transition from information technology (IT) to business technology (BT). This shift recognizes that in the digital age, technology directly shapes the customer experience and is therefore central to competitive differentiation rather than merely enabling internal operations. The companies that survive the customerpocalypse will be those that make this transition successfully.

Chapter 6: Organizational Transformation: Aligning Structure with Customer Needs

Surviving the customerpocalypse demands more than new technology—it requires fundamental organizational transformation. Traditional structures built around functional silos and internal hierarchies cannot deliver the seamless experiences Gen D customers demand. The journey begins with reimagining the relationship between business and technology teams. A leading benefits management company demonstrated this transformation by creating "innovation centers" that pulled hundreds of IT employees into direct collaboration with business units. Rather than treating technology as a service to be requested through formal channels, these centers made technology an integral part of business operations. The results were dramatic: reduced operating expenses, accelerated innovation, and estimated productivity gains of 30% over ten years. This approach exemplifies "hybrid vigor"—the enhanced capabilities that emerge when different organizational DNA is combined. Just as cross-pollination produces stronger plants, cross-functional teams develop more innovative and effective customer solutions than either business or IT could create independently. ING Poland achieved similar results by standardizing common processes across departments while allowing for necessary variations, ultimately achieving 80% process reuse while expanding into new markets and distribution channels. Executive leadership must evolve to support this transformation. Some organizations have created new roles like Chief Process Officer (CPO) to elevate the importance of customer processes throughout the enterprise. At Telstra, Australia's leading telecommunications company, the General Manager of Process Excellence leads efforts to understand customer needs and translate them into seamless experiences. Similarly, the emerging Chief Customer Officer (CCO) role brings customer perspective directly into executive decision-making. Perhaps the most significant organizational change involves redefining customer service. Traditional definitions focus on transactions—"performing a service," "ensuring satisfaction with a product," or "handling a complaint." This transactional view must be replaced with relationship-oriented engagement. American Express exemplified this shift by transforming its customer service representatives into "Customer Care Professionals" responsible for building relationships rather than processing transactions. The company's operating framework—enable, engage, empower—focuses on listening to customers and measuring success through Net Promoter Scores rather than operational metrics. Even the CFO function must change to support this transformation. Traditional return-on-investment calculations based on fully defined requirements and fixed outcomes conflict with the iterative, adaptive approach needed for customer-centric systems. CFOs must embrace a more experiential model that allows for directionally correct decisions supplemented by feedback loops and validated through intermediate results. This shift is enabled by the growing number of CFOs with operational backgrounds who can bridge financial discipline with business innovation. The ultimate organizational transformation integrates all these elements to create a structure explicitly designed for customer engagement. It breaks down internal barriers, aligns incentives with customer outcomes, and empowers employees to make decisions that enhance the customer experience. Without this foundational change, even the most advanced technology will fail to deliver the seamless, authentic experiences Gen D customers demand.

Chapter 7: The Digital Imperative: Becoming Your Software in a Customer-Driven World

The digital revolution has fundamentally changed how businesses connect with customers. As Marc Andreessen famously observed, "Software is eating the world"—companies across all industries are becoming software companies whether they recognize it or not. Your software has become your primary interface with customers, representing your brand, values, and capabilities in every digital interaction. This transformation requires embracing three core principles. First, democratize how you do technology by shifting control from technical specialists to businesspeople. Just as word processing evolved from specialized typing pools to universal business tools, technology must move from arcane programming languages to business-friendly interfaces that empower non-technical users to create and modify systems. This democratization allows those who understand customer needs to directly shape the customer experience without technical translation. Second, think in layers to address the multidimensional nature of business. Traditional programming creates flat, two-dimensional systems that struggle to adapt to different customers, products, and jurisdictions. By identifying what is common across the business and what is unique to specific contexts, companies can build systems that adapt dynamically to each situation. This layered approach enables genuine personalization for every customer interaction while maintaining consistency in core processes. Third, use analytics to optimize continuously. Dynamic analytics examine patterns across millions of customers to sense needs, preferences, and behaviors, allowing systems to adapt in real-time to changing circumstances. PNC Bank's Chief Marketing Officer explains, "Data is extremely important and it's at the core of everything we're doing. But it is not about the data, it's about the insight." These analytics create feedback loops that continuously improve customer engagement based on actual outcomes rather than assumptions. OCBC Bank exemplifies these principles with its FRANK initiative targeting Gen D customers. FRANK stores are designed like Apple retail locations, encouraging browsing and discovery rather than traditional banking transactions. The simplified website omits traditional corporate information, focusing exclusively on customer needs with personalized savings tools and social incentives. This approach reflects OCBC's understanding that Gen D customers reject being sold to but embrace discovering authentic brands that align with their values. The companies that survive the customerpocalypse will be those that become software companies at their core. This doesn't mean simply adding mobile apps or social media icons—it requires building systems that embody your unique digital DNA. Generic cloud services or outsourced development cannot create the authentic, differentiated experiences Gen D demands. Your software must express your values, commitment, and empathy for customers in ways no competitor can replicate. This transformation represents an existential challenge for many businesses. As Accenture's research reveals, 66% of consumers switched companies due to poor service in the past year, with 82% believing their provider could have prevented their departure. Traditional businesses are failing to keep pace—none of the industries in Accenture's survey made noticeable progress in providing tailored experiences, even as customer expectations continue to rise. The imperative is clear: you must become your software. Your digital presence is no longer a supporting function but the primary expression of who you are as a business. Companies that recognize this reality and transform accordingly will not merely survive the customerpocalypse—they will thrive in the customer-driven world that follows.

Summary

The digital revolution has fundamentally shifted power from businesses to customers, creating an existential threat for companies unable to transform their engagement models. The emerging Generation D—characterized by their desire to discover rather than be sold to, their tendency to either devour or demonize brands, and their rejection of traditional customer-business relationships—demands nothing less than a complete reimagining of how companies operate. Survival requires integrating data (memory) with intent (judgment and desire) through customer processes (muscle) to create a 1080-degree high-definition view that enables authentic, seamless experiences across all touchpoints. This transformation cannot be achieved through incremental changes or technological quick fixes. It requires democratizing technology to empower businesspeople, thinking in layers to address multidimensional customer needs, and using analytics to continuously optimize engagement. Most fundamentally, it demands recognizing that in the digital age, your software is you—the primary expression of your brand, values, and capabilities. Companies that successfully make this transition will not only survive the customerpocalypse but thrive in the new reality where customer trust must be earned and re-earned through every interaction. The path forward is challenging but clear: become your software or risk becoming irrelevant to a generation of customers who hold unprecedented power to determine your fate.

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Alan Trefler

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