Cover design: Bluewolf
Copyright © 2016 by Eric Berridge. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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ISBN 978-1-119-32603-8 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-119-32604-5 (ePDF); ISBN 978-1-119-32606-9 (ePub)
Fifteen years ago, Eric Berridge and I sat in a coffee shop and discussed how Salesforce would be a game changer for businesses. Salesforce had a vision to revolutionize enterprise software – with a new technology model based in the cloud, a new pay-as-you-go business model, and a new integrated corporate philanthropy model. Today, Salesforce has grown from a groundbreaking idea into a Fortune 500 company, the largest customer relationship management (CRM) company, and one of the most innovative companies in the world.
Companies of every size and industry now expect to do business with the speed, agility, and economics delivered by cloud, social, mobile, data science, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. Like Salesforce, Bluewolf has always prioritized the needs of customers and brought to life not just the technology but also the strategies that help customers accelerate their growth.
In his book, Customer Obsessed: A Whole Company Approach to Delivering Exceptional Customer Experiences, Eric shares what he has learned over the last decade and a half of helping companies create the next generation of digital experiences on the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. He looks at data, design, and culture through a customer-first lens. Utilizing data, including real-time analytics, and designing intelligent customer journeys are key to knowing customers and engaging with them across sales, service, and marketing at every touch point.
But more important than the technology is building a company culture that focuses on the well-being of all stakeholders – not just shareholders, but also employees, customers, our communities, and even the environment – to achieve the highest levels of success.
As business leaders, we have a responsibility to improve the state of the world. Contrary to what the famous economist Milton Friedman said or what many of today's business leaders think, the business of business is not just business. The business of business is to improve the state of the world, and I've found that making the world a better place and climbing the Fortune 500 rankings are not mutually exclusive.
Eric offers incisive advice for establishing a stakeholder culture and connecting at an emotional, rather than transactional, level. As he points out in the book, millennials – who make up at least 50 percent of the workforce – are teaching us that the future of work lies in creating workplaces where employees feel a higher sense of purpose. That means fully integrating values like equality, diversity, transparency, and giving back to the community into the fabric of a company.
