Driven by unparalleled insights, innovation and increasingly fierce competition, it certainly appears as if the golden age of the customer is upon us.

Life used to be much simpler: you had a product, or provided a service, and if people wanted it, they’d buy it. There was little in the way of visibility into customer satisfaction, other than the fact that they kept buying your product, or stopped. There was also a lot less choice. The focus, it can be said, was squarely on the product. Customers were seen as targets to which something could be sold.