Don Peppers - Managing Customer Experience and Relationships

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

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D.,are often credited with having created, or at least kickstarted, the whole customer-centric approach to business which became known as customer relationship management (CRM). In their first book together, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time, they called the concept “one-to-one marketing.” Since then, they have written 10 more books further exploring, elucidating, and expanding the subject (see list at the end of this section).

Over time, the discipline has evolved, new terminologies have been created, and many of the practices Peppers and Rogers included as elements of one-to-one marketing would today be considered to be part of the customer-experience-management discipline. In the B2B space they would be considered part of the account-based marketing (ABM) or customer success management disciplines.

In 1993 they founded the Peppers & Rogers Group, which became a leading customer-centric management consulting firm with offices and clients on six continents. In 2013 they were inducted into the Direct Marketing Association Hall of Fame, and in 2016 they were jointly ranked by Satmetrix (now a unit of NICE) as the world's number-one most influential authorities on customer experience management.

Much sought after as public speakers, Peppers and Rogers have delivered talks or workshops in about 60 countries around the world. Whenever they speak, they make it a point to tailor and adapt their messaging for companies in virtually every business category imaginable. Today, they have once again joined forces to form CX Speakers, a business exclusively designed to deliver keynote presentations, instruction, workshops, and thought-leadership consulting focused exclusively on the customer experience and all its related topics, which range from digital technologies, disruption, and innovation to customer metrics, social selling, customer success, customer advocacy, trust, and corporate culture.

Prior to his career as an authority on customer-centric competition, Don Peppers served as the CEO of a top-20 direct marketing agency, and his book Life's a Pitch: Then You Buy (1995) chronicles his exploits as a celebrated new-business rainmaker in the advertising industry. He holds a B.S. in astronautical engineering from the US Air Force Academy and a master's in public affairs from Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs. He also has a popular voice in business media and is LinkedIn's most widely followed authority on customer experience, with more than 300,000 followers.

Martha Rogers is the founder of Trustability Metrix, a firm designed to help companies understand how to measure and improve their levels of trust by customers, employees, and business partners. After a career in advertising copywriting and management, Rogers has taught at several universities, most recently as an adjunct professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, where she codirected the Teradata Center for Customer Strategy. Rogers has been widely published in academic and trade journals, including Harvard Business Review, Journal of Advertising Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing , and Journal of Applied Psychology . She has been named International Sales and Marketing Executives' Educator of the Year. Rogers earned her Ph.D. at the University of Tennessee as a Bickel Fellow.

Books by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D:

The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time (Doubleday, 1993).Tom Peters: “Book of the Year” (1993)BusinessWeek: “Bible of the new marketing” (1994)Inc. Magazine: “One of the two or three most important business books ever written” (1995)

Enterprise One to One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age (Doubleday, 1997).Wall Street Journal 5-Star Rating

The One to One Fieldbook: The Complete Toolkit for Implementing a 1 to 1 Marketing Program (Doubleday, 1999), coauthored with Bob Dorf.

The One to One Manager: Real-World Lessons in Customer Relationship Management (Doubleday, 1999).

One to One B2B: Customer Development Strategies for the Business-to-Business World (Doubleday, 2001).New York Times Business Best Seller

Managing Customer Relationships: A Strategic Framework (Wiley, 2011).

Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value from Your Scarcest Resource (Doubleday, 2005).One of Fast Company's “15 Most Important Reads” of 2005One of Fast Company's “25 Best Business Books” in 2007

Rules to Break & Laws to Follow: How Your Business Can Beat the Crisis of Short-Termism (Wiley, 2008).Inaugural title in Microsoft's “Executive Leadership Series”

Managing Customer Relationships: A Strategic Framework, Second Edition (Wiley, 2011).

Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage (Penguin, 2012).

Managing Customer Experience and Relationships: A Strategic Framework, Third Edition (Wiley, 2016).

Extreme Trust: Turning Proactive Honesty and Flawless Execution into Long-Term Profits (revised and updated Penguin Paperback, 2016).

Books by Don Peppers:

Life's a Pitch: Then You Buy (Doubleday, 1995).

Customer Experience: What, How, and Why Now (BookBaby, 2016).

No company can succeed without customers. If you don't have customers, you don't have a business. You have a hobby.

—Don Peppers and Martha Rogers

There can be no doubt that technological progress has irreversibly transformed the nature of business competition, giving customers much greater power, making them ever more knowledgeable, connecting them seamlessly to other customers, and raising their expectations and demands significantly with respect to the products and services they buy.

New technologies also allow an enterprise to treat different customers differently, in contrast to the way business was done for virtually the entire twentieth century, when an enterprise would treat all its customers in basically the same way. Except for some high-end products and business-to-business (B2B)services, no enterprise could afford the time and expense required to pay attention to individual customers, one customer at a time. Instead, enterprises focused on the most common needsof their “average” customer, and then publicized their product benefitsand attributesin the same way to everyone, in hopes of persuading some of these average customers to buy. But because of technology, enterprises can now do business in an entirely different way. Using computer databases, an enterprise can easily identifyand remember its individual customers, one customer at a time, even if it has millions of them, paying close attention to the experience it provides to each customer and to its ongoing relationship with them. Using the internet, along with technologies such as Wi-Fi and smartphones, an enterprise can now interactdirectly with each of its individual customers and prospective customers, responding to inquiries, posing questions, and making different offers or suggestions to different customers.

And now that enterprises can do these things, competition requires them to do so. The problem for today's enterprise is that the old marketing strategies and tactics, having been designed to attract as many average customers as possible for whatever product or service an enterprise was selling, don't help much when it comes to planning the best way to treat different customers differently . Instead, an enterprise needs a customer strategy, designed to meet different individual customers' different individual needs, and to maximize the amount of business an enterprise is able to do with each different customer.