Total Customer Engineering

The definitive framework for designing, measuring, and optimizing every customer interaction - now fully rebuilt for the age of artificial intelligence.

Customer Worthy: Total Customer Engineering is the comprehensive expansion of Michael R. Hoffman’s foundational work, first published in 2010 and downloaded more than 500,000 times. Recognized by the Journal of Marketing, the original CxC Matrix framework transformed how executives think about customer experience. This edition reimagines it entirely for the AI-driven, sensor-saturated economy of today.

At the core of Total Customer Engineering is the CxC Matrix 3.0 - a 90-cell accountability grid mapping 15 customer lifecycle stages across 6 interaction channels, with 9 treatment objectives applied to every cell. The result: 810 measurable accountability points that give organizations the precision to engineer customer experience the way they engineer any other business system - with defined inputs, tracked outputs, and financial consequences attached to every decision.

What this book delivers:

• The complete CxC Matrix 3.0 architecture - updated for omnichannel, AI-assisted, and automated interaction environments
• The Customer Sensor Mesh - a framework for capturing behavioral signals across every touchpoint before customers articulate their needs
• The VMAO Cycle (Value, Measure, Analyze, Optimize) - a repeatable system for converting interaction data into revenue-protecting decisions
• Contact-level P&L methodology - tools for assigning financial accountability to individual customer interactions, not just aggregate satisfaction scores
• The Femtosecond Economy model - understanding why AI has compressed response windows to the point where anticipatory design is no longer optional
• The Nine Objectives framework - ensuring every customer interaction achieves measurable business purpose, not just task completion
• AI integration guidance - where automation creates value, where it destroys it, and how to design the boundary between them

Total Customer Engineering is written for Chief Customer Officers, Chief Experience Officers, Chief Digital Officers, VPs of Customer Success, and any executive responsible for the financial performance of customer relationships. It is equally essential for consultants, business school faculty, and strategists building the capability to compete in an economy where the customer’s next move is already being predicted - and the only question is whether your organization is predicting it first.

Hoffman draws on decades of senior leadership in financial services, digital transformation, and customer strategy - including roles at BNY Mellon, Guidehouse, and DoubleClick/Google - to deliver a framework that is both theoretically rigorous and operationally deployable. Every model in the book has been tested in practice. Every metric has a business case attached.

This is not a book about customer satisfaction. It is a book about customer engineering - the discipline of making every interaction count, every channel perform, and every AI deployment serve the customer rather than evade them.

For organizations ready to move from measuring customer experience to engineering it.