Yet management is the art of the best use of scarce resources. Investment capital is no longer our scarcest resource. In the customer economy, loyal customers have become the most precious commodity. Today the hardest thing for a company to acquire is not investment capital, products, employees, or even a brand. It's customer loyalty.
Customer relationships are the fundamental source of value in the new customer economy.
Customer capital is now at least as important as investment capital. The seismic impact of this customer revolution is being registered by the world's stock markets. Investors and financial analysts may not yet have articulated the importance of customer metrics for the companies they follow, but the executives who are running these companies know how important their customer relationships are to their future earnings. They're examples of the many companies you'll be reading about in the following chapters that watch their bottom lines but run on customer metrics. In fact, that may be the most surprising finding in the research behind this book.