Connecting to the Empowered Customer: Aspect Software

Author: Aspect Software

Date: 26th February 2011

How the right customer strategy can help companies succeed in the age of the empowered consumer

Executive Summary

Consumers have more power than ever before. The ease with which they can access and compare product features, service capabilities and pricing, combined with their unprecedented ability to influence thousands – if not millions – of fellow consumers, has exploded. A dramatic increase in publicly available information and communication channels has gradually shifted the power from businesses to customers and has inverted the dynamic between the two. The first wave of the power shift began with widespread consumer use of personal computers and the web. It has been so gradual that many companies have failed to notice it or respond to it.

The effects of the first wave are often hidden in flat or declining sales, brand erosion, weaker financial performance, and greater customer attrition and churn.

The next wave of the power shift was triggered with the onset of Web 2.0 – the transformation of the Internet from an information source to a collaborative public forum. This collaborative forum gives individual consumers the ability to reach vastly more people with their thoughts and ideas, and has enabled these thoughts and ideas to survive for longer periods of time (see Figure A). Resulting from Web 2.0 is Power Shift 2.0: the age of the activist consumer that utilizes emerging web technologies such as blogs, chat rooms, wikis, content syndication feeds and personal web pages to air both their praises and frustrations about their experiences with corporate brands. Power Shift 2.0 promises to further change the dynamic between consumers and companies.

Aspect Software

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