REVOLUTION.COM: Podcast with Patricia Seybold, CEO, the Patricia Seybold Group.

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In 1998, a woman named Patricia Seybold authored a book, customers.com, which crystallized the requisites for dot.com-era eBusiness into one, simple tenet: know who your customers are and make sure you have the products and services they want. She built on that theme a few years later with a second book, The Customer Revolution.

Seybold's refreshingly straightforward ideas about customer service, along with the compelling case histories she presented, had a powerful effect on the burgeoning arena of ecommerce. But when the dot.com bubble burst, what happened to that customer revolution?

In an exclusive interview with EnterpriseLeadership.org, Patricia Seybold talks about how the landscape of doing business via the Internet has changed in the seven years since her first book's publication -- and how it has not changed. (And a lot really has not changed, according to Seybold.)

The guidelines she offered for how to succeed in eBusiness -- build community, deliver personalized service, streamline processes, and more -- are as relevant today as they were in the 1990s. But back then, the business that a company did over the Internet was often just a small part of its profit base. Today, eCommerce is a growing priority for businesses, large or small, legacy or startup. And, consumer demands for excellence are only growing.

Today, Seybold and her group are focused on helping their clients prioritize their IT initiatives around customer issues, and bridging what she calls "The Business Schism," that great divide between IT and the business it supports. She offers solid advice, too, about ways to provide the service that customers want and expect, such as how to create solid, cross-channel customer experiences and how to avoid the trap of building bottlenecks into business processes.

All of this only drives home the point that the work of this eBusiness revolutionary is far from done.

Resources

Patricia Seybold Group

Bio

Patricia Seybold founded and leads the Patricia Seybold Group, is a respected IT consultant and speaker, and is a best-selling author. Her book, Customers.com, published in late 1998, provides insight into how 16 still-thriving companies designed their e-business strategies to improve revenues, increase profitability, and enhance customer loyalty. Seybold's latest book, The Customer Revolution, published in 2001, describes how 13 global businesses in a variety of industries manage by and for customer value while they continuously improve the quality of the customer experience they deliver. She is co-author of Brandchild, published in 2003. Her books have been translated into over 10 languages.

Production Credits

Dana Farver, Executive Producer, Communities Editor-in-Chief
Tom Parish, Audio Producer, Show Host
Kimberly Stone, Web Development Manager