Managing Customer Experience and Relationships. Don Peppers

Acknowledgments

      We started the research and planning for the first edition of this book in 2001. Our goal was to provide a handbook/textbook for students of the customer-centric movement to focus companies on customers and to build the value of an enterprise by building the value of the customer base. We have made many friends along the way and have had some interesting debates. We can only begin to scratch the surface in naming those who have touched the current revision of this book and helped to shape it into a tool we hope our readers will find useful.

      We are indebted to the chorus of contributors and writers whose voices have helped to make this book what it is. As big as this book is, it is not big enough to include formally all the great thinking and contributions of the many academicians and practitioners who wrestle with deeper understanding of how to make companies more successful by serving customers better. We thank all of you, too, as well as all those at dozens of universities who have used earlier editions of the book to teach courses, and all those who have used the book as a reference work to try to make the world a better marketplace. Please keep us posted on your work!

      This book has been greatly strengthened by the critiques from some of the most knowledgeable minds in this field, who have taken the time to review this book as well as earlier editions and to share their insights and suggestions with us. This is an enormous undertaking and a huge professional favor, and we owe great thanks to Becky Carroll, Jeff Gilleland, Mary Jo Bitner, James Ward, Ray Burke, Anthony Davidson, Susan Geib, Rashi Glazer, Jim Karrh, Neil Lichtman, Charlotte Mason, Janis McFaul, Ralph Oliva, Phil Pfeifer, Marian Moore, David Reibstein, and Jag Sheth. Thanks to John Deighton, Jon Anton, Devavrat Purohit, and Preyas Desai for additional insights, and we also appreciate the support and input from Mary Gros and Corinna Gilbert. And thanks to Maureen Morrin and to Eric Greenberg, and to John Westman, co-founder of Novellus, Inc. and adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School and Boston College Carroll School of Management.

      Don's class of “Markets of One” at Menlo College in Spring 2021 contributed to our insights on Facebook and trust. Thanks to Dr. Julie Edell Britton, who team-taught the “Managing Customer Value” course at Duke with Martha for many years, and the smart students there, and to Rick Staelin, who has always supported the work toward this textbook and the development of this field. Additional thanks to all of the marketing faculty members at Duke, especially Christine Moorman, Wagner Kamakura, Carl Mela, and Dan Ariely, and all those who have used and promoted the book and its topics.

Many thanks to David Allison, CEO of Valuegraphics; to Mike Betzer, CEO of Hypergiant and formerly an executive at Khoros and Lithium; to Guy Nirpaz, founder and CEO of Totango; to Zeynep Manco, formerly a consultant in the Istanbul office of Peppers & Rogers Group; to Roger McNamee, venture fund executive, early investor in Peppers & Rogers Group, and author of the book Zucked, for his insightful comments on the threat that Facebook poses both to individual privacy and to the future of business competition itself; to Karl Wirth, founder of Evergage (now a part of Salesforce) and author of One-to-One Personalization in the Age of Machine Learning; to Steve White, president and special counsel to CEO at Comcast; to Brooks Bell, founder of Brooks Bell, a digital marketing agency; and to Karen Ganschow, head of data sciences at Aware Super in Australia and formerly General Manager Consumer Marketing and Customer Strategy at National Australia Bank.

      Much of this work has been based on the experiences and learning we have gleaned from our clients and the audiences we have been privileged to encounter in our work with Peppers & Rogers Group. Dozens and dozens of the talented folks who have been PRGers over the past years have contributed to our thinking—many more than the ones whose citations appear within this book, and more than we are able to list here. Our clients, our consulting partners and consultants, and our analysts are the ones who demonstrate every day that building a customer-centric company is difficult but achievable and very worthwhile financially. Special thanks go to Hamit Hamutcu, Orkun Oguz, Caglar Gogus, Mounir Ariss, Ozan Bayulgen, Amine Jabali, and Onder Oguzhan for their thinking and support. We also thank Tulay Idil, Bengu Gun, and Aysegul Kuyumcu for research. And to Thomas Schmalzl, Annette Webb, Mila D'Antonio, Elizabeth Glagowski, and Mike Dandrea of the 1to1 Media team, and especially Marji Chimes, our gratitude for a million things and for putting up with us generally. We also appreciate the work Tom Lacki has done for this book and our thinking, as well as the work of Valerie Peck, Alan Pennington, and Deanna Lawrence. Special additional thanks for ideas in the original edition that have survived to this version to Elizabeth Stewart, Tom Shimko, Tom Niehaus, Abby Wheeler, Lisa Hayford-Goodmaster, Lisa Regelman, and many other Peppers & Rogers Group alumni as well as professionals who are the winners of the 1to1 Impact Awards and PRG/1to1 Customer Champions, who are best in class at customer value building.

      Our executive editor at John Wiley & Sons, Sheck Cho, has been an enthusiastic supporter of and guide for the project since day one. As always, thanks to our literary agent, Rafe Sagalyn, for his insight and patience.

      We thank the many professors and instructors who are teaching the first customer strategy or CRM course at their schools and who have shared their course syllabi and suggestions. By so doing, they have helped us shape what we hope will be a useful book for them, their students, and all our readers who need a ready reference as we all continue the journey toward building stronger, more profitable, and more successful organizations by focusing on growing the value of every customer.

      The real secret sauce to finishing the many details has been Amanda Rooker—a truly resourceful researcher and relentlessly encouraging and gifted content editor, who has patiently and capably assisted in winding us through the morass of secondary research and minutiae generated by a project of this scope. Cheerfully and brilliantly finding, handling, resolving, and tracking inconsistencies, errata, and potential pratfalls is just part of her genius. If there are any errors left, they are our fault, not hers.

      As ever, we remain grateful to our patient and supportive spouses, Pamela Devenney and Dick Cavett.