Imagine you just bought a brand new guitar and you’re ready to shred. Your amp is on and set high, your cords are all plugged in, you’re ready to jam. You strum an E major chord only to find that it plays an F minor – not good. You just want to noodle over Baba O’Reilly but now you have to call support, explain a whole spiel, and potentially deal with long wait times and some irritating back-and-forth until you can finally realize your inner Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Raise your hand if you’ve heard that your business needs to be customer centric. Now raise your hand if your business is customer centric. If you didn’t raise your hand at all – and not only because you are in a public space and are wary of strangers seeing you perform erratic movements – then you better quickly learn why your B2B business needs to be customer centric. Never even heard of customer centricity?

Rome wasn’t built in a day – and it didn’t fall in one either. Come the 4th and 5th centuries, the leaders neglected the needs of their various peoples, and oftentimes, as in the case of Majorian, they seemed outright surprised at the unpopularity of some measures. Could Majorian have used a 360-degree view of his Roman subjects (read: customers)?

Living in the Digital Age, so much of our lives are saturated with data and information. But with so much information available, sometimes we can feel like Johnny Mnemonic, past cranial-storage capacity, where additional data doesn’t help us solve any problems, and instead makes it even more difficult to solve problems.

The concept of customer experience has become one of the main focuses of customer-facing teams, and for good reason. The customer experience is at the forefront of everything a company does for its customers, whether it's the products and services they provide or the simple, everyday interactions between them. Concepts like customer-centricity and being customer-first are now at the forefront of a pioneering spirit in customer support and related fields, yet many companies are still falling behind.

Like people, a lot of businesses like to think that by saying that they have certain traits, then they automatically have those certain traits. Take being customer-centric, for example. Just because a business declares that they are customer-centric and therefore always put their customers first, does that make it true? Not so much, no.

Some words are used so often that their meaning is blunted or outright transformed. One of these such words is “success,” and depending on the reader, can mean anything from “victory” to The Weather Girls’ album. As far as Customer Success teams are concerned, it leans towards the former (sorry fans of 1980s post-disco, your day will come).

Ever wish a robot could cook or clean for you? We might not be on Jetsons-level technology, but for customer service and sales professionals, the robot assistants are already here. When you hear “chatbots” what do you think of? Helpful robots, conversational cannon fodder, or malevolent machines bent on siphoning off human employment? Well for one, chatbots aren’t coming for Customer Support jobs. Secondly, the others are both correct, but only to an extent.

What colors our imaginations? When it comes to our concepts of artificial intelligence and robots, how much of it is affected by what we’ve seen on TV and in the movies, from The Matrix to Blade Runner? Beyond that, how prominent is the fear of automation taking jobs from humans? Evidently, it has been a very real thing, ever since the Luddites first destroyed textile mills in early 19th century England.

Human brains are wired to process images 60,000 times faster than text. The age-old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is apparently severely undershooting it. Not only that, but an image has the ability to instantly traverse cultural and lingual barriers. Heard of the painting The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh?