Patricia B. Seybold

Founder, CEO and Author

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Direct questions to Patty:  Send email to pseybold "at" customers.com

Expert

With 38 years of experience consulting to customer-centric executives in technology-aggressive businesses across many industries, Patricia Seybold is a visionary thought leader with the unique ability to spot the impact that technology enablement and customer behavior will have on business trends very early. She assesses and predicts how new and evolving technologies will impact customers.

Seybold forecasts the ways in which both business and consumer customers will make new demands on companies in many different industries. Seybold provides customer-centric executives within Fortune 1000 companies with strategic insights, technology guidance, and best practices. Her hands-on experience, her discovery and chronicling of best practices, her deep understanding of information technology, her large, loyal client base, and her ongoing case study research enhances the thought leadership she provides.

Consultant and Speaker

As a consultant, Seybold uses a coaching, mentoring, and learn-by-doing approach to help clients achieve their goals. She primarily works with clients who are willing to engage their customers in helping them shape their new products and services. She is a firm believer in, and practitioner of, customer co-design. Patty has worked with clients in a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, fitness, mining, financial services, power generation, retail, travel, education, agriculture, etc. Her client base is global.

Using customer interviews, customer scenarios and knowledge of customer-impacting technologies, Patty has helped hundreds of organizations: to develop new products and services, to design better end-to-end customer experiences, to define business processes that better serve their customers’ needs, to prioritize their IT initiatives, to address organizational roadblocks, and to develop customer-centric metrics and performance monitoring systems.  Clients include Amazon, GE, Fidelity, Cisco, Symantec, Citigroup, American Cancer Society, American Institute of Physics, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and many others. (See more about Patricia Seybold Group clients.)

Patty is also a compelling speaker. She is sought after by both business, non-profit, and technology audiences worldwide to share her insights and experiences – from designing customer-impacting business processes to implementing leading-edge technologies to creating and achieving a community's vision.

Author and Publisher

Seybold is an internationally acclaimed best-selling author. The company’s Web site takes its name from the ground-breaking book, Customers.com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy on the Internet and Beyond. Published in 1998, the book provides insight into how sixteen still-thriving companies designed their e-business strategies to improve revenues, increase profitability, and enhance customer loyalty.

Other books by Patricia Seybold and colleagues are:  The Customer Revolution: How to Thrive when Customers Are in Control (2001) and Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company’s Future (2006).  With Martin Lindstrom, Seybold co-authored BRANDchild: Remarkable Insights into the Minds of Today’s Global Kids and Their Relationship with Brands (2003). She also midwifed a book of stories and drawings written and illustrated by 42 Ugandan girls and young women describing how they transformed their families and their communities. It Takes a Child to Raise a Village is available for free download.

Patty’s blog, Outside Innovation, was launched as a companion to the book of the same title.  Seybold’s blog posts and tweets draw interest and comments from a worldwide group of followers.

Seybold’s companies have published research reports and articles for over 35 years. The Patricia Seybold Group now publishes more than fifty articles per year. Access to the articles, including archives back to 2003, is available to subscribers to the Customers.com® membership services.

Background

Seybold launched the Patricia Seybold Group in 1992. It succeeded the Patricia Seybold’s Office Computing Group, which she spun off from Seybold Publications, Inc., in 1985. 

As a Vice President at Seybold Publications and the Seybold Consulting Group, Patty apprenticed with her father, John W. Seybold, who is considered the guiding force in transforming the publishing industry to electronic publishing.  John Seybold’s companies offered consulting, seminars and advisory reports, a pattern that she continued with her company.

At Seybold Publications, Patty earned the respect of leaders in the computing industry and in companies that pioneered the use of computing technologies. There she began long-standing relationships with a large and loyal base of clients. In the Seybold family business, she worked alongside her two brothers—Jonathan Seybold, who is credited with creating the desktop publishing industry and who built Seybold Seminars into a major trade show enterprise, and Andrew Seybold, who is one of the world’s leading authorities on mobile, wireless computing.

She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from Goddard College, Vermont.

Boards

Seybold has been on the Board (University Council) of the African Rural University for Women in Uganda for eight years.

She is on the Board of CohesiveFT, a cloud networking company.

Patty is the Board president of the Boothbay Region Health & Wellness Foundation--a 501(c)(3) committed to improving health outcomes for the year-round and seasonal residents on the Boothbay, Maine peninsula, where she lives and works.