This comprehensive textbook provides an easy introduction to the subject of customers and ensures that the needs of business students will be met in an up-to-date and innovative manner.

Struggling to ensure that the customer is at the center of all your business does? This book is your guide to putting the "customer" in customer experience. Not sure what that means? Well, for starters, too many executives believe they are delighting their customers. Why wouldn't they think that?! When they focus on growth, those customer acquisition numbers are pretty sweet, but they don't tell the real story. Prioritizing customer retention is critical. But you can't just throw technology at it, give it some lip service, and call it a day. Retention is hard work! You've got to understand who your customers are and what problems they are trying to solve or what jobs they are trying to do. Then you've got to use that understanding to design an experience that helps customers achieve their goals. That's the key to putting the customer in customer experience! Ultimately, you need to bring the customer voice into all meetings, decisions, processes, and designs. The customer must be at the center of all you do. After all, it's all about the customer! In this book, I cover the three approaches to customer understanding: surveys and data, personas, and journey mapping. I could've written the whole book about journey mapping, but there's so much more to building a customer-centric business than journey mapping. The culture must first be deliberately designed to put the customer at the heart of the business. And all foundational elements of a CX transformation must be in place to make that happen. With that knowledge, read this book and: Learn about the three approaches you must use to understand your customers, why you must use them, and how they work together. Create an action plan to ensure insights gleaned from these three approaches are implemented in your organization. Develop and assign personas to your customers in order to better understand their needs, goals, problems to solve, and jobs to be done. Learn the difference between touchpoint maps and journey maps and how touchpoint maps can still be a valuable asset in your customer experience toolbox. Understand why journey mapping is called the backbone of customer experience management - and how to make it so in your organization. Set up and facilitate your own current-state and future-state journey mapping workshops with customers. Set up and facilitate service blueprint workshops with internal stakeholders. Find out how to put the customer at the heart of your business. And more!

This fully updated second edition of Understanding Customers is a recommended textbook for the Understanding Customers Certificate CIM paper. It is divided into six parts covering the social sciences, people as individuals, people in groups, people in society and people in organisations. Each chapter of Understanding Customers consists of: * learning objectives and definitions * the theoretical background * exercises * issues to consider * current examples * implications for marketing * recent examination questions. Chris Rice is Senior Lecturer in the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University. He is a CIM examiner on the Understanding Customers paper and has widespread consultancy experience in both the private and public sector.

This edited volume will help business and academic researchers understand the means-end approach to understanding consumers. This is a qualitative marketing research method to gain customer insight into decision making.

MANAGING CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIPS A Strategic Framework Praise for the first edition: "Peppers and Rogers do a beautiful job of integrating actionable frameworks, the thinking of other leaders in the field, and best practices from leading-edge companies. "—Dr. Hugh J. Watson, C. Herman and Mary Virginia Terry Chair of Business Administration, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia "Peppers and Rogers have been the vanguard for the developing field of customer relationship management, and in this book, they bring their wealth of experience and knowledge into academic focus. This text successfully centers the development of the field and its theories and methodologies squarely within the broader context of enterprise competitive theory. It is a must-have for educators of customer relationship management and anyone who considers customer-centric marketing the cornerstone of sound corporate strategy." —Dr. Charlotte Mason, Department Head, Director, and Professor, Department of Marketing and Distribution, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia "Don and Martha have done it again! The useful concepts and rich case studies revealed in Managing Customer Relationships remove any excuse for those of us responsible for actually delivering one-to-one customer results. This is the ultimate inside scoop!" —Roy Barnes, Formerly with Marriott, now President, Blue Space Consulting "This is going to become the how-to book on developing a customer-driven enterprise. The marketplace is so much in need of this road map!" —Mike Henry, Leader for Consumer Insights at Acxiom Praise for the second edition: "Every company has customers, and that's why every company needs a reference guide like this. Peppers and Rogers are uniquely qualified to provide us with the top textbook on the subject, and the essential tool for the field they helped to create." —David Reibstein, William Stewart Woodside Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

This book is a response to a need in the market place in the fast-growing field of customer profitability analysis and the profitable management of customer relationships. It combines innovative approaches to calculating the value of customers, with the management strategies necessary to make and keep customers profitable. It includes easy-to-follow instructions on how to calculate customer profitability, including worked examples (non-technical) and discusses strategies and their applications for organizations to manage customers profitably. Based on cases and feedback from the KAM Club and other research, there will be many business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer examples. The book assumes some level of numeracy in its readership. The contents include: Assessing product costs, costs to serve and how these can be estimated, and how to deal with customer-specific overhead costs. It discusses the uses and limitations of the use of customer profitability analysis, and illustrates how to calculate customer lifetime value using two methods, one with actual numbers and one which estimates relative customer lifetime value. Provides an innovative approach to calculating the lifetime value of a customer by taking risk into account. Demonstrates how to recognise and value the relationship benefits of customers, such as word of mouth. Brings into discussion the idea that how customers are managed, links to their profitability. Describes how financial portfolio analysis and theory apply to marketing and how, their application to marketing relates to the optimisation of marketing spend.

Abstract: "This book discusses the indispensable value of understanding consumer activities and the crucial role they play in developing successful marketing strategies by focusing on concepts such as consumer perceptions, consumption culture, and the influence of information technology"--Provided by publisher