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'Father of customer experience' to speak at August retail event

Lou Carbone will deliver a keynote address at this year's Retail Customer Experience Executive Summit.

April 22, 2013

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Lou Carbone, the man who coined the term "customer experience" and is hailed as the father of the experience movement, will deliver a keynote address at this year's Retail Customer Experience Executive Summit.

Carbone's 1994 article, "Engineering Customer Experiences," published in Marketing Management magazine, is seen as the beginning of the customer experience discipline. He has been a pioneer in the field ever since, and his 2004 book, “Clued In: How to Keep Customers Coming Back Again and Again,” is considered one of the must-reads on the topic.

"Retail, as we knew it, will never exist again," Carbone said. "In today’s 21st-century business world we are living in a state of discontinuous change. Customer engagement, loyalty and advocacy are no longer driven by the products you sell or the service you offer; they’re driven by how well the experience you provide meets your customers’ ever-changing emotional needs and wants. It’s not the function a business provides, but the effect it has on customers’ lives that creates value. It cannot be business as usual." 

Taking place August 13-14 at the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego, Calif., the Retail Customer Experience Executive Summit is an exclusive networking and education event for retail executives. Other topics to be covered in interactive sessions include Big Data's impact on retail, the mobile revolution, how to fight "showrooming," and how to build a winning employee culture. Registration is open, and advance registration pricing is in effect.