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Chapter 1
The Customer Today
Once a good product was all you needed. Today, the totality of the
experience has equal impact.
In today’s marketplace, consumers are a different breed than they were even
five years ago. They are much better informed, better educated, and more
demanding in the products and services that they require, and they are more
familiar with technology. The future belongs to those companies that can
capture and share their internal customer knowledge and combine it with
new information about their customers.
On the supply side of the market, there is significantly increased compe-
tition, with very little product and service differentiation, ...