Patrica Seybold

Patty is a ARU Council Member and AFPF Board-Chair. She helped compile and edit the URDT Girls School Book, It Takes a Child to Raise a Village. She has visited URDT 12 times and her late husband Tom Hagan 3 times. Customer Co-Design (in International Development).

Safira receives her new book.

Mapping with ARU Students

Patty Seybold is the Board Chair of the African Food and Peace Foundation. She has been involved with Uganda Research Development & Training programme (URDT), whose motto is “Awakening the Sleeping Genius in Each of Us,” since 1998.

She has served on the Council for URDT’s African Rural University (ARU) since 2012. She has published a number of articles describing the work of that organization, and edited and produced a book written and illustrated by the URDT Girls School Students, entitled “It Takes a Child to Raise a Village.” For many of these students, the book they created was the first book their family ever owned.

In addition to her volunteer work with AFPF and URDT, Patty is a consultant specializing in co-creating customer ecosystems with the participants, students, beneficiaries, or end-users of services as the design center. By involving the end-users of a product or service in the design and delivery of that service and including the representative stakeholders from the entire delivery ecosystem in the user-centered design process, the results are rapid adoption and utilization. Over her 50-year career, she has worked with hundreds of organizations all over the world.

Thought Leader. Patricia Seybold has been a highly regarded visionary thought leader and business and technology strategist for over 50 years. From 1998 until the present, after the publication of her first best-selling book, Customers.com, she has been acknowledged as a leader in Customer Experience and Customer Innovation. From 1978 to 1998, she was best known as an information technology visionary. She has the ability to spot the impact that technology enablement and customer behavior will have on business trends. Patty forecasts the ways in which customers will make new demands on companies in different industries.

Patty and her team practice customer-led innovation. She partners business executives with insightful customers to co-design new services and solutions. She leads teams of customer and company executives in co-design workshops, and sustains the dialogue through Customer Advisory Boards, Customer Councils, and online Customer Communities. She ensures that customers’ insights are heard and helps companies turn insights into action.

Her hands-on experience, discovery and chronicling of best practices, deep understanding of information technology, large and loyal client base, and ongoing case study research enhances the thought leadership she provides Customer.

Co-Design Facilitator. Patty co-developed the firm’s customer co-design methodology, Customer Scenario® Mapping with clients in the late 1980’s. She continues to evolve and refine the techniques.

She is skilled in leading teams of customers, channel partners, and cross-functional executives to design their ideal experiences for achieving their outcomes and identifying customers’ moments of truth and metrics. She helps her clients’ teams redesign their businesses from the outside in by inviting their customers to invent new streamlined ways of accomplishing their desired outcomes, using their own real-world scenarios.

Patty is adept at helping groups of stakeholders agree on short-term and strategic priorities. She is skilled in eliciting customer-critical metrics and helping clients identify operational performance metrics and ROI metrics they can monitor. These customer-centric metrics become the levers that focus everyone on improving performance on customer-critical issues.

Best-Selling Business Author. An internationally acclaimed best-selling author, Patty’s ground breaking book, Customers.com, provides insight into how 16 still-thriving companies designed their e-business strategies to improve revenues, increase profitability, and enhance customer loyalty by making it easy for their customers to do business with them.

The Customer Revolution describes how 13 global businesses in a variety of industries manage by and for customer value while they continuously improve the quality of the customer experience they deliver across multiple channels. The Customer Revolution contains the original framework for her firm’s Quality of Customer Experience (QCE)SM methodology and Customer Dashboards.

Outside Innovation, has become one of the seminal titles in innovation literature. Its premise is that customer-led innovation should provide 50% of your firm’s innovations in terms of new services, products, business models, and business processes to support them. Find your “lead customers,” and let them help you co-design your next gen strategy and products.

Patty Seybold’s books have been translated into more than 10 languages.

Educational Background. Patty holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. She is certified as a facilitator in DMA and as a Three Principles Facilitator in Innate Mental Health.

Selected Published Articles

(Most of Patricia’s articles can be found at https://customers.com)