Customers have more power today than ever before. They have tremendous influence and reach through social media, more options and choices of whom to buy from, and high expectations about customer service. Instead of hunkering down and wishing this trend would go away, or trying to change but with a penny-pinching eye on costs only, enterprises must embrace this new reality. To thrive in this new era of the customer, companies must 1) embrace customer empowerment by focusing on business process transformation from the outside in, 2) make the customer experience a high priority, 3) use change management to move the organization to a culture of customer centricity, 4) elevate social media to the status of a standard communication channel, and 5) focus on data quality to deliver a single view of the customer.