Customer Experience

It is getting harder to captivate customers -- or even to please them -- because Amazon, Google, et al. have set the bar for service so high.

It can be seven times as expensive to acquire a new client as to keep an existing one, so carriers must focus on customer retention.

Satisfaction ratings keep plummeting, but insurers can captivate customers by integrating all sales channels seamlessly and efficiently.

A single view of the customer is now paramount. Three questions must be addressed.

Shares of companies that did the best job on customer experience outperformed average companies by 35 percentage points.

And the customer perception is that insurers' service is lousy, largely because of call centers. The solution is a move to mobile -- and it can cut costs.

As the music industry shows, the Age of the Customer means that every company must change its focus and embrace the new.

When the tables turned and the author became a software customer, "the loftiness of strategic vision met the cold, hard pavement of execution."