Customer Management (Expanded Edition): How Retailers Must Change to Survive and Succeed

“Our mission is to delight our customers…” Retailers talk about customers all the time. So why are they so slow to fully embrace customer-centric approaches in how they run their businesses day in and day out? While easy to understand in concept, customer-centric retailing has proven elusive in application. Until now. A retailer’s long-term performance is ultimately driven by customer sales, not product sales. The traditional product-centric retailer seeks to sell individual product categories to as many customers as possible. By contrast, the customer-centric retailer seeks to sell as many categories (and services) as possible to selected customers over time. The difference isn’t just academic, it impacts every facet of the business and how it makes decisions. In this book, Dippold and Sallenave propose a common definition and understanding of what customer-centric retailing means, explain why current efforts usually yield less than expected, and present a pragmatic, step by step approach to customer management that really delivers on its promise. This Expanded Edition of the book explains how changes in technology are putting more decision-making power in the hands of the customer, and how this forces retailers to think and act differently. It presents the foundational principles behind customer management and lays out a business process developed by the authors for putting customer management into practice. The book presents the tools and templates used at each step of the process, with examples drawn from actual data. It is an indispensable reference guide for anyone interested in how to implement customer management in a retail organization. For a more concise overview, the book also comes in the Executive Edition. The Executive Edition is a quicker read that explains the key principles behind customer management and presents a high-level overview of the process.