You wonder why? You work so much harder - you do more cold calls than ever. You send out more email marketing in a month than just 5 years ago the whole year. You doubled your call center capacity in India and added another one in the Philippines. You spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the "best" consulting firms to get to a low touch sales process. You trimmed your support force to a minimum. Your IT organization helped you to remove all the "external noise" You did everything your CEO told you to do. And still your P+L goes deeper in the red.

Test1: Ask your CEO to do a "Customer Experience Program" for only 1 month:
1) Remove all spam filters from your corporate email server.

2) Let every cold caller through and give it to your boss

3) Take every mail that arrives and make a copy for the Chief

4) Make every outgoing call in your company go through an automatic dialer like "If you want to talk to an employee, press 1, if you like to talk to a customer press 2, if you like to talk to your family press 3..." and don't forget to add "Please listen carefully to the following options as our menu has recently changed".

5) Let your employees go through a screening process every morning to check if they qualify to work here, if they are ready to work hard, if they have a budget to spend the salary on and if they are a qualified employee. Maybe you can use your customer qualification process internally too.

Test 2: Then do another customer experience program for only 1 month:
1) Don't send out ANY email that is not personally written to some other person.

2) Stop all cold calls, outbound call center activities and alike initiatives

3) Tell your operations manager to turn down the automatic phone switch and have some humans answer the call right away

4) Open the ports to social media sites (several companies block it) and let your sales people socialize instead of hard core selling. Read "Sales in the new enterprise" if you haven't already.

5) Get your product managers to spend at least one hour a day in the relevant forums and groups.

6) Ask your support teams to invest 25% of their time to answer questions in online discussions.

7) Tell your marketing team to cease advertising (see ceaseadvertising.com) and use the money that is left to engage with your market. Enhance your customer experience model in an online engagement and start listening what is going on.

8) Tell your legal department to sue your business process consultants for the advice to automate your customer relationship management to an extend that you rather lose them instead of winning new. Make it a $100 Million Law Suit at the minimum.

What next:
You may need to print this blog post and give it to your CEO as he probably is neither in this forum nor he knows how to get here.

@AxelS

P.S.
I know my spelling and grammar sucks! My mantra: "Speed is more important than perfection". Who ever finds a mistake - can keep it. ;-)