You are no longer in control of your company's destiny...It happened in the music business and it will happen in yours. It's only a matter of time. Customers actually take control of an industry and start to reshape it from the outside in. Customers decided that the way they want to use an industry's product doesn't fit the current business model.
Thanks to the Internet and to mobile wireless devices, both business and consumer customers are demanding that you change your pricing structure, distribution channels, and the way you design and deliver products and services. Your business must be transformed so that it is completely customer-centric, or you will be out of business.
Patricia Seybold's advice to companies facing the customer revolution? You can fight it if you want, just as Don Quixote fought imaginary windmills and thought he was winning battles. But naturally he lost the war and so will you. Better, says Seybold, to practice "sweet surrender," just as the music industry has started to come to terms with Napster - in the words of one executive, "thirty-eight million people can't be criminals."
What Seybold provides in The Customer Revolution is not only a brilliant analysis but also a practical program for how you can make the customer revolution a profitable one. The companies that thrive in the customer revolution will be those that measure and monitor what matters to customer, in near real time.
