The Customer Revolution

Patricia Seybold's Customers.com was a Wall Street Journal, Business Week, New York Times, and Amazon best-seller. With more than 200,000 copies in print, and translated into 15 languages, it is widely acknowledged as the most successful and most influential book on e-commerce. In Revolution!, Seybold identifies an essential truth of business today: the power that had been flowing to customers is rushing in a torrent. Now customers are driving business. When AOL, a $5 billion company with a depth of knowledge about its customers, bought the $28 billion Time Warner, a more traditionally oriented company with almost no such knowledge, this lesson was made dramatically clear. Seybold points to companies around the world that have devised innovative ways of operating from this revolutionary new premise -- and shows how all managers and investors can apply this outlook to their own businesses and investment strategies. Gone is the blinkered focus on old yardsticks like profit margins and sales per square foot. Central now are the metrics for success that measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. We're in the midst of an economic transformation as fundamental as that of the Industrial Revolution. Patricia Seybold reports here on the strategies that are working for the smartest companies in the new e-conomy, and that can work for every one of us as well.