On the road to a market of one.

• Author: Motley, L. Biff
• Position: CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

UNTIL THE ADVENT OF INDIVIDUALIZED COMPUTING and the connectivity of the Internet, the best way for businesses to scale up their operation and grow profit was to treat customers as indivisible markets and employees as positions on an organizational chart--rather than unique sources of value and talent.

The winning idea was to mass produce and sell standard products to large, indistinguishable populations. Since the Industrial Revolution, anything that stood in the way of this paradigm was dismissed as impractical or uneconomical.

The Internet and the increasing miniaturization and mobilization of devices are starting to turn this business model upside down by giving consumers growing powers over the conduct of the marketplace. This is especially true for service-centric businesses. Since we can now communicate with anybody in the world at nearly zero cost, customers can establish their own interaction preferences on websites and do other influential things that move us in the direction of individual economic targets.

Here are two examples of smart early-mover insights into this emerging fork in the road.

"Live person" service

According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, while megabanks are often perceived as bad at keeping customers happy on the Web, where mishandled complaints can go viral and damage a bank's reputation, Citibank has launched a team of customer service personnel who have received specific training in ways to proactively respond to social media complaints.

While other banks have found it difficult to be responsive online due to regulations and privacy issues, CitiBank has developed and codified into a "playbook" ways for agents to handle customer complaints in real time, or at least initiate a process that is satisfying to the customer. While research shows larger banks to be weak at keeping Web customers happy, CitiBank resolved 36 percent of queries while other large banks responded...