Blueprint for Customer Obsession

Customer Obsession is the secret sauce that has fueled the success of some of the world’s most beloved and successful brands, including Amazon.com, Apple, Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Zappos. The phrase was popularized by Amazon.com to describe the extreme approach to prioritizing customers that has established the company as a model of customer experience excellence to be emulated. That obsessive emphasis on prioritizing customers is also credited as a key factor in Amazon’s rise to become one of the most dominant companies across the globe. Other companies like Costco, Trader Joe’s, and Zappos that are legendary for their customer experience excellence have a similarly extreme approach to prioritizing customers even though they didn’t initially refer to themselves as Customer Obsessed. They’re also known for industry leading business results.

Yet very few companies have achieved the level of customer experience excellence that earns them the right to be called Customer Obsessed. This book, Blueprint for Customer Obsession, lays out the eight habits and practices that distinguish Customer Obsessed companies from their “Customer Focused” or “Customer Centric” peers and makes the secret sauce of Customer Obsession accessible to business leaders worldwide. Blueprint for Customer Obsession demonstrates with concrete examples that Customer Obsession is not just a slogan, a catchphrase, or a rallying cry. It is a handbook for any leader that wants to engineer a Customer Obsession transformation in their company or business unit.

Marbue Brown is an accomplished customer experience executive with a track record of thought leadership and signature business results at some of the most iconic companies on the planet, including JP Morgan Chase, Amazon.com, Microsoft Corporation, and Cisco Systems. As a CX leader, he guided the Chase Consumer Bank to record performance in the JD Power Retail Banking Study, NPS and branch satisfaction. He transformed the Andon Cord mechanism at Amazon.com from a primarily manually activated system to a primarily automated system, triggered by machine learning and statistical models. The Andon Cord is one of the most significant programs Amazon.com uses to personify its Customer Obsession culture. Marbue devised and codified the NSAT Improvement Approach at Microsoft, which business units and subsidiaries used to dramatically improve CX. He co-authored landmark articles about customer experience measurements that are widely cited in industry. He is a sought-after speaker and published author on customer experience, business strategy and economic policy.