Citigroup Is Listening to Its Customers, and It's Paying Off

In the following interview segment, Doug Levy, author and CEO of MEplusYOU, explains why Citigroup (NYSE:C) could be a surprising model for success. The full interview with Doug Levy can be seen HERE, in which he discusses his new book, Can't Buy Me Like. In the book, Levy tackles the changing marketing space, believing that companies must either adapt or continue to put blind faith in increasingly ineffective advertising. Levy also explains a new era that we've entered, dubbed the 'relationship era', and describes how this will change marketing for all companies, big and small.

Brendan Byrnes: One of the things I wanted to ask you about was one of the examples you have in the book; Citibank, which is interesting because you can go all sorts of different companies. A lot of people think Citibank has this bad reputation among some people, but they're actually one that you cite as doing a good job in this respect?

Doug Levy: Yeah. One of the things that they've done, I think, is ...

First, some companies do embody a Relationship Era approach to doing business kind of intuitively, automatically. Some get there because they've experienced pain. Citibank's clearly in that latter category. They've experienced a tremendous amount of pain, and I think it was a wake-up call to at least some people at Citi.

One of the things they started doing is really listening to their customers, I believe. They did that by using the Net Promoter Score -- you were asking about metrics before; that can be a great metric to assess the degree of trust in the relationship between a company and an individual -- and putting into practice some of the things that they heard customers declaring an interest in.