Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
Customer obsession is heralded as a virtue in business. From Jack Bogle, who was passionate about democratizing investing for Vanguard Group account holders, to Jeff Bezos, who signaled a “relentless” focus on customers in his first letter to Amazon shareholders, CEOs and founders have built legendary businesses and cultures on a “customer first” mentality.
But a recent discussion I had with Zig Serafin, CEO of Qualtrics, which makes software that lets organizations listen to and act on customer and employee feedback, revealed just how complicated being “customer obsessed” has become. Thanks to the explosion of digital platforms, there are many more ways and places for customers to interact with your company. That means there are also more forums for them to leave feedback—if they bother to do so at all.
Qualtrics’s 2024 Consumer Trends Report found that 66% of customers won’t tell a company directly if they’ve had a bad experience, up about seven percentage points from 2021. And as many outlets have reported, trust in business is eroding, especially among the youngest consumers; a separate Qualtrics report finds that just 28% of Gen Z customers have confidence in the organizations with which they do business, compared with 57% of Baby Boomers.
