With 30 years of experience consulting to customer-centric executives in technology-aggressive businesses across many industries, Patricia Seybold is a visionary thought leader with the unique ability to spot the impact that technology enablement and customer behavior will have on business trends very early. She assesses and predicts how new and evolving technologies will impact customers.

Seybold forecasts the ways in which both business and consumer customers will make new demands on companies in many different industries. Seybold provides customer-centric executives within Fortune 1000 companies with strategic insights, technology guidance, and best practices. Her hands-on experience, her discovery and chronicling of best practices, her deep understanding of information technology, her large, loyal client base, and her ongoing case study research enhances the thought leadership she provides.

Seybold is an internationally acclaimed best-selling author. Her ground breaking book, Customers.com, published in late 1998, provides insight into how 16 still-thriving companies designed their e-business strategies to improve revenues, increase profitability, and enhance customer loyalty.

Her latest book, Outside Innovation, was published by HarperCollins in October 2006. This book describes the “new” approach to the process of business innovation, customer co-design. Check out her Outside Innovation blog for the latest on the best practices in customer innovation—customer co-design. It offers insights into how to make it easy for customers to do business with you and how to measure and monitor what matters most to a company’s fundamental source of value: its customers.

The Customer Revolution, published in 2001, describes how 13 global businesses in a variety of industries manage by and for customer value while they continuously improve the quality of the customer experience they deliver.

She is co-author of BRANDChild, published in 2003. Her books have been translated into over 10 languages.

In addition to writing business bestsellers, Patricia Seybold has published dozens of research reports each year since the late 1970s. As publisher of Patricia Seybold Group’s Customers.com® Advisory Service, Seybold is responsible for setting the direction of the group’s research agenda and is a frequent contributor of original research. Seybold has authored numerous case studies for her research as well as for clients.

Her work has also been recently published in the Harvard Business Review and Business 2.0, CIO Magazine, Fast Company, Computerworld, and many other publications.

She is frequently quoted in major publications such as Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The New York Times, and Investor’s Business Daily, among others.

Seybold is a highly acclaimed keynote speaker at business conferences and industry symposia worldwide. Her visionary insight and experience in designing customer-impacting business processes and implementing leading-edge technologies make her sought after by both business and technology audiences.

Seybold uses a coaching, mentoring, and learn-by-doing consultative approach to help clients achieve their goals as they transform their corporate cultures to be more customer-centric. She helps her clients’ teams redesign their businesses from the outside in by inviting their customers to invent new streamlined ways of accomplishing their desired outcomes, using their own real-world scenarios. Seybold’s Customer Scenario® mapping methodology facilitates cultural change in organizations as key stakeholders from different product lines, departments, and organizations join with customers to co-design those customers’ most critical interactions

Seybold and her team of consultants use Customer Scenarios to help companies adapt their business processes to better serve customers’ needs, to prioritize their IT initiatives, to address organizational roadblocks, and to develop customer-centric metrics and performance monitoring systems. Seybold is the creator of the Quality of Customer Experience (QCE)^SM consulting methodologies that are used within Patricia Seybold Group’s consulting engagements and client workshops. The QCE methodologies are used to help client’s jumpstart and continuously improve their customer-centric initiatives.

The QCE methodologies include Customer Scenario® mapping and Seybold’s Customer Flight Deck^SM Performance Measurement framework. This framework enables companies to monitor and to continuously improve both their customer profitability and the Quality of the Customer Experience they deliver in near real-time.

BACKGROUND

• Patricia Seybold Group, Inc. 1992 to present
• Patricia Seybold’s Office Computing Group, Inc. 1985 to 1992
• Seybold Publications, Inc. 1976 to 1985, Vice President

Seybold apprenticed with her father, John W. Seybold, who is considered the guiding force in transforming the publishing industry to electronic publishing. In that family business, she worked alongside her two brothers—Jonathan Seybold, who is credited with creating the desktop publishing industry and who built Seybold Seminars into a major trade show enterprise, and Andrew Seybold, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on mobile, wireless computing.

BA in Comparative Literature, 1972, Goddard College, Vermont

Seybold is a member of the founding council of the African Rural University for Women in Uganda (see her ARU in Action blog).