The Customer Centric You is Now Available

New book aims to change the lives of readers and maximise the success of organisations

Everyone in your life is a customer and maximising your success in professional life and personal life demands a holistic approach to understanding your customers’ agenda, according to a new book, The Customer-Centric You, published on Monday, February 21 2011.
The book, The Customer-Centric You, by Stephen Hewett, introduces the concept of customer-centricity, defined as an attribute of any entity that is doing all that it can reasonably do to focus on, and minister to, the agenda of its customers. As well as being a life philosophy, customer-centricity is also vitally important for all commercial sector and public sector organisations. It means they can maximise customer service quality while at the same time creating leaner organisations that lead to major reductions in costs.
The Customer-Centric You is a book as much for the general reader as for the business reader. It is emphatically not a dry, jargon-filled management book. Written in a lively, entertaining, passionate style, The Customer-Centric You quotes people as diverse as Dale Carnegie, Charles Dickens, J B Priestley, George Orwell, Mark McCormack, JK Rowling and Steve Lewis, chief executive of Majestic Wine. Stephen Hewett also offers lessons from a fictitious hard-hearted Victorian industrialist, Tobias Hardcastle, who has a habit of bursting uninvited into Stephen’s office to hammer home lessons in customer-centricity!
The many real-life business examples from which lessons are drawn include The John Lewis Partnership, Wiltshire Council, the Tesco Club Card, Majestic Wine and the Six Sigma-certified dabbawallah (lunch-box delivery) service of Mumbai, India. Books and movies quoted include How To Win Friends and Influence People, A Christmas Carol, What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School and It’s a Wonderful Life. The Customer-Centric You also includes important new thinking, published here for the first time, from Professor David Thomson, one of the world’s leading consumer psychologists.
The Customer-Centric You argues that we can all become better at our relationships with our customers, no matter how good we think we are at this already, and that these ‘customers’ include not only our customers in our professional lives, but also all the people who matter to us in our lives generally. Author Stephen Hewett asserts that no-one can maximise their performance in business if they believe they have a ‘business-life persona’ and a ‘personal-life persona’. In fact, he says, we only have one persona - ourselves - and it is up to us to make ourselves as sincerely customer-centric as we can.

Stephen Hewett says that being customer-centric is above all about having the right attitude, and that if necessary it’s perfectly possible to train oneself to develop a more customer-centric attitude than one has already. He says that customer-centricity isn’t something that can just be installed in an organisation by loading some suitable software, but that individual attitude is what matters, no matter what the size of the organisation. As he points out:
Ultimately, customer-centricity is delivered not by an organisation but by the people who work for it.
The Customer-Centric You has a foreword by Mark Price, managing director of Waitrose and himself a passionate advocate of customer-centricity. As Mark Price explains:
Customer-centricity really is the core of business. Indeed, it can be seen as the essence of life itself. None of us could survive as babies if others didn’t care about our agenda and put our needs before their own. Parents realise that this selflessness is a fundamental part of bringing up children, but it’s too easy to forget that we have customers in all aspects of our lives and they all need our attention.
Author Stephen Hewett is becoming known as a leading authority on customer-centricity. A former pilot, he subsequently worked at The John Lewis Partnership for fifteen years. He is currently head of business consulting at Charteris plc, the UK-based business and information technology consultancy, which has a major consulting division that specialises in customer-centricity.
The Customer-Centric You by Stephen Hewett with illustrations by Ed Young is available from Management Books 2000 Limited, Forge House, Limes Road, Kemble, Cirencester, GL7 9AD. Tel: 01285 771441 Fax: 01285 771055 www.mb2000.com The Customer-Centric You is also available from amazon.co.uk and from all good bookshops.