Announcing The 2005 Copernican Awards

Apr 19, 2005

The idea of being customer-centric is not new. "The customer is always right." "The customer is king." These are in the popular business parlance - Googling them yields almost 100,000 results - and for good reason: who in business would create a slogan to ignore customers, or pursue strategies that harmed the customer experience?

But, to state the obvious, there's often a big difference between what companies say and what they do. Lots and lots of companies say they're customer-centric but have no customer experience strategy; no way to measure customer-oriented metrics; no executive compensation tied to those metrics. There's a lot of "say" but no "do".

As I wrote in my Oct. 26, 2004 column:

My business partner, Phil Terry, likens it to the pre-Copernican view of the world. Like the misguided early notion that the universe revolves around the earth, many business executives today still think that business revolves around companies.

If that belief ever was true in the past, it certainly isn't true today... Whether online or offline, customers now have unparalleled power to research and transact with companies exactly when, where, and how they choose.

The trick is to find companies that actually do this work and not just promise to do it. Focusing on actual phenomena - actual behavior - actual results - is the important distinction. We take the same approach with customer research: we use open-ended listening labs to see what customers do, instead of using surveys, focus groups, or task-oriented usability tests. It's also our perspective about our own consulting work: measured business results are infinitely more important than whether our consultants came up with a nice-sounding theoretical framework.

Given the importance of this perspective, reconsider that idea of customer-centric business. Think about it: where are the companies that actually do focus on the customer? I mean companies that have taken action to work explicitly on this issue, and have the resulting metrics. If you had to find a list of these companies, where would you go? Well, we've found them - or at least a few of them - and they are the finalists for the 2005 Copernican Awards.

The 2005 Copernican Award finalists:

--- LARGE CATEGORY ($1B+ in annual revenue or budget) ---

* Amazon
* JetBlue
* Staples
* Westin Hotels

--- MEDIUM CATEGORY ($100M+ in annual revenue or budget) ---

* ING Direct
* New York State DMV - License Express
* Netflix
* Uline

--- SMALL CATEGORY (Less than $100M in annual revenue or budget) ---

* Blacksocks
* Chambers Street Wines
* Flickr (recently sold to Yahoo!)
* Sigalert.com

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This is my first time mentioning the awards, so here's the background. The Copernican Awards are awarded annually (2005 is the inaugural year) to top companies and organizations that succeed by putting customers at the center of their "business universe."

The awards are created and run by Creative Good, sponsored by Forbes Magazine, and ultimately determined by the Customer Experience Councils. These are forums, run by Creative Good, of over 80 senior executives dealing with marketing, product development, and customer experience across a range of industries. The Council members participate in a lot of different activities, meetings, and research throughout the year - but in this case are responsible for nominating companies for the Copernican Awards, and voting on the finalists to determine who wins in each of the three categories.

The award winners will be announced at a dinner in New York next week (the night before Gel 2005 starts) where the Council members, and other invited executives - about 240 people total - will be gathered to celebrate the awards, the finalists, and the winners.

There's a lot more to say about the finalist companies. We have assembled information, through our own research and from the companies themselves, on their specific customer-centric strategies, actions, and measured results. We really don't care what their slogan is, or how much they claim to focus on the customer; we wanted to learn what they actually do, and what they've measured as a result.

When I have more time and space after Gel, I'll talk more about these Copernican Award finalists and what you should learn from each of them. Meantime, congratulations to all the finalists.

And to other customer-centric companies that weren't yet nominated, or executives that aren't yet in the Customer Experience Councils, but want to be - please get in touch.

More info:

- Details on the Copernican Awards 2005

- Wikipedia's entry on Copernicus

- Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, will speak at Gel 2005. (Today is the last full day to sign up)

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