The Customer Centricity Ebook Collection (3 Books): Customer Centricity, The Customer Centricity Playbook, and The Customer-Base Audit

Introduction to The Customer Centricity Ebook Collection Copyright © 2024 by Wharton School Press

Wharton School Press previously published the following ebooks:

Customer Centricity: Copyright © 2020, 2012 by Peter Fader

The Customer Centricity Playbook: Copyright © 2018 by Peter Fader and Sarah Toms

The Customer-Base Audit: Copyright © 2022 by Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross

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Ebook ISBN: 9781613631836

Contents

Introduction

Customer Centricity, by Peter Fader

The Customer Centricity Playbook, by Peter Fader and Sarah Toms

The Customer-Base Audit, by Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross

Introduction

Welcome to The Customer Centricity Ebook Collection. This ebook includes three ebooks:

Customer Centricity, by Peter Fader

The Customer Centricity Playbook, by Peter Fader and Sarah Toms

The Customer-Base Audit, by Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross

The ebooks are presented here in the order in which they were published, and each is a replica of the ebook as it appears elsewhere.

We hope you enjoy The Customer Centricity Ebook Collection. Please share your feedback with us at [email protected].

Available in the

Wharton Executive Essentials Series

Customer Centricity:

Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage

by Peter Fader

Financial Literacy for Managers:

Finance and Accounting for Better Decision-Making

by Richard A. Lambert

Global Brand Power:

Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth

by Barbara E. Kahn

Innovation Prowess:

Leadership Strategies for Accelerating Growth

by George S. Day

For more information,

visit wsp.wharton.upenn.edu

WHARTON EXECUTIVE ESSENTIALS

PETER FADER

CUSTOMER

CENTRICITY

© 2020, 2012 by Peter Fader

First edition © 2011. Formerly titled

Wharton Executive Education Customer Centricity Essentials.

Published by Wharton School Press

The Wharton School

University of Pennsylvania

3620 Locust Walk

300 Steinberg Hall-Dietrich Hall

Philadelphia, PA 19104

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without written permission of the publisher. Company and product names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61363-101-0

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61363-102-7

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface: You Must Read This Before Entering the Time Capsule

Introduction

CHAPTER 1:

Product Centricity: Cracks in the Foundation

CHAPTER 2:

Customer Centricity: The New Model for Success

CHAPTER 3:

Customer Equity: New Views on Value

CHAPTER 4:

Customer Lifetime Value: The Real Worth of Your Customers

CHAPTER 5:

Customer Relationship Management: The First Step Toward Customer Centricity

Conclusion

Afterword

Acknowledgments

About the Wharton Executive Essentials Series

About the Author

About Wharton School Press

About the Wharton School

Preface:

You Must Read This Before Entering the Time Capsule

The customer isn’t always right. Rather, the right customer is always right. And yes, there is a difference.

It was eight years ago when I wrote those words, as I began working on the book that aimed to be a call to action for the business strategy that I (and others) have termed customer centricity. Those three sentences were perhaps a bit flip, and in truth, they didn’t really quite explain what customer-centric thinking is all about.

But this little turn of phrase, I thought, would serve as a much-needed wake-up call—not only to marketing professionals but to entire companies and, more broadly speaking, the business world at large. The reality was that, at the time, such a wake-up call was badly needed.

Now as I look back eight years later—after more than 60,000 copies have been sold—I can proudly say that I was right about the need for a wake-up call.

Customer Centricity was first published in 2011. In so many ways it seems like a strange, distant past: a past in which product-centric thinking reigned supreme and few businesses were even aware that a viable alternative existed. Today, almost (I should emphasize: almost) every executive understands the power of data—and the absolute, unquestioned necessity to be relentless in seeking new and innovative ways to put that data to use. Today, many more businesses understand that their customer base is composed of a widely varying spectrum of buyers, each of whom brings a varying level of value to their company. And this is true in all markets: business-to-business versus business-to-consumer, products versus services, big-ticket items versus inexpensive low-involvement ones, and domestic versus multinational.

Today, many more executives understand the perils of product-centric thinking and that long-term survival in the hypercompetitive business environment demands not merely great customer service but also a firm grasp of how to engage with different kinds of customers in ways that create meaningful value for the customers as well as the company. Being everybody’s friend is generally not the best approach to achieve the kind of sustainable growth that stakeholders demand.

Today, customer-centric thinking is no longer a bizarre niche occupied by a few oddball companies (and ivory tower academics). It is well on its way to becoming a conventional strategy that all firms will seriously consider, if not adopt, as their primary organizing mindset.

This was not the case in 2011.

Back then, I felt at times as though I was shouting into the wilderness. I knew that the small group of us who had begun to shape these ideas were on to something—and it was going to be something big. I knew that customer lifetime value (CLV), a term that many readers encountered for the first time when they read this book, would become an essential metric for countless companies seeking accountable success. And I knew that companies that failed to embark on any effort to better understand the differing needs, wants, and potential value of their heterogeneous customers would ultimately pay a price. I also knew that there were an awful lot of CEOs and Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) out there who had no earthly idea what I was talking about, much less had any intention of putting my ideas to work.

This was a time in the history of modern business when a company such as Starbucks could be so naïve as to build a customer loyalty program around little more than occasional free cups of coffee for regulars. This coffee giant had millions of customers walking in and out of its stores every single day, which means it was being presented quite literally with millions of opportunities to better engage with those customers. To better understand them. To better serve them. To better profit from them. And yet, given those opportunities, the Starbucks of 2011 (unlike the Starbucks of today) did not make this a priority. To me, it was maddening. But Starbucks was hardly alone.

In the first edition of Customer Centricity, I shined a not-so-flattering light on a number of companies that were failing and flailing as the data age dawned. Two notable examples were Starbucks and Nordstrom, though there were many others. I examined the perils of product-centric thinking and how too many companies were falling into a product-focused trap. I explored the new and emerging strategies that some early adopters of customer-centric thought, such as the Harrah’s casino chain and Tesco grocery stores in the UK, were beginning to put to use, with great success—at least at that time. I explained how customer relationship management (CRM) had lost its focus, and how it could be reenergized by the most fundamental customer-centric ideas. I made an impassioned plea for change.

And apparently I won some people over.

Starbucks Has Come a Long Way on Customer Centricity

Not long after the book was first published, I got a phone call from Aimee Johnson, who at the time oversaw the loyalty program at Starbucks. I didn’t know it at the time, but Aimee was not calling to praise my work. Instead, she was on a mission (assigned by a senior executive) to educate this renegade Wharton professor to stop being so critical of the company. I couldn’t tell this from the initial call (Aimee didn’t explicitly tell me about this assignment until years later), but she asked a lot of interesting questions about my radical ideas and how they may (or may not) apply to Starbucks. After several follow-up calls, she realized that my ideas were, in fact, nicely aligned with the bold transformation that Starbucks had started to undergo. But some of the ideas, language, and analytical tools I referred to in the book were very new (and, in some ways, seemingly threatening) to the company.

Long story short: Aimee became a fan of the work and, in turn, became one of the Heroes of Customer Centricity whom I have praised in countless executive education sessions and keynote talks. Likewise, Starbucks as a whole made major changes to better understand its customers at a granular level and to leverage these insights in a truly customer-centric manner.

Take, for instance, the clever idea that is the Leaf Raker’s Society. If you haven’t heard of this particular corner of the internet, well, that’s no mistake. The Leaf Raker’s Society is supposed to be a secret Facebook group. Most specifically, it’s a secret Facebook group for people who are passionate about—you guessed it—raking leaves (among other autumn activities).

Launched by an internal Starbucks marketing team in the summer of 2018, the group is, in truth, little more than a brilliantly disguised, ongoing, permanent advertisement for the ever-popular pumpkin spice latte, which reappears on the Starbucks menu each fall. Described as a site for people who are year-round scarf-wearers with a goal of helping Autumn arrive earlier in the calendar year, the Leaf Raker’s Society has evolved into a truly organic online community; as of this writing, the group had more than 37,000 members and had sparked millions of conversations since its launch that go well beyond Starbucks products. That’s customer centricity in action.

For the members, it’s simply a site to celebrate fall, sweaters, pumpkins, and, of course, pumpkin spice lattes. But for Starbucks, it’s so much more. It’s a window into its customers’ hearts and minds; it offers not just usable data about those customers—Facebook, as we know for better and worse, is a treasure trove of personal data—but also, and perhaps more importantly, some perspective about how and why a group of people who are passionate about, of all things, a season are also passionate about pumpkin spice lattes. From a marketing perspective, it’s a masterstroke, and as somebody who came down somewhat hard on Starbucks in the initial publication of this work, I have to tip my cap here and say:

Well done, Starbucks. Well done. You’ve come a long way.

And what about Aimee Johnson? Well, after doing great things to help Starbucks navigate the customer-centric waters, she recently decided it was time to take on a new challenge—to take her expertise to a very different company in another sector that is in desperate need of some customer-centric transformation. Today, Aimee is the CMO of Zillow, helping this digitally native real-estate giant broaden its strategy to extend well beyond its initial scope of home listings, including buying and selling homes, providing financing to homebuyers, and a range of other services that will help create lasting relationships with high-value customers. It’s bold and risky, but it’s a great example of how customer-centric thinking can cross traditional industry lines with a visionary leader like Aimee Johnson to make it happen.

Apple Is Still Late to the Party, While Nordstrom Has Evolved

For every Starbucks, there is another company that, out of either stubbornness or ignorance, simply refuses to wake up to the reality of twenty-first-century commerce. Counted among these companies, I am dismayed to report, are some of the most successful brands in the world of business.

My frustration with the Silicon Valley giant that is Apple is hardly new; it dates all the way back to the glories of the Steve Jobs era. Genius though he may have been, Jobs always was a strictly product-centric thinker. He had a famously large ego, a competitive streak that bordered on obsession, and complete confidence not only in his own individual brilliance but also in the brilliance of the products he created. To put it bluntly, I don’t believe that Jobs ever really cared about his granular customers because he believed he knew better than they did. He would lead, he would create, and they would follow.

We must give credit where it is due: his instincts and product-centric practices were uniquely successful—at least for a while. Perhaps 10 or 15 years ago, Jobs’s singular reliance on product-centric thinking was pure gold. There is no doubt that this mindset helped him conceive and develop some of the most revolutionary digital devices the world has ever seen.

But eight years after his death, the simple, honest truth is that Apple has effectively plateaued—and a big reason for this is that the tech giant was so late to the party on customer-centric thinking. People are often surprised to hear it, but anyone who operates in the world that I do—a world in which data analytics are central to pretty much everything about a business—knows for a fact that Apple is still pretty bad at understanding its customers or using data to get smarter about them. It is a company that is bogged down in product-centric thought, and it continues to do things that make me shake my head. It tries to convince external audiences how much it cherishes privacy, but to me it seems more that it is waving the white flag when it comes to understanding and leveraging customer differences—particularly in contrast to all of the other West Coast tech behemoths.

Take, for instance, the company’s decision in early 2019 to dismantle the old-school iTunes platform that had become such a joke among the internet crowd. This clunky, outdated system offered little to customers and didn’t seem to be doing much for Apple either—at least in terms of data. But rather than just scrap the platform and build something new and better for all involved, Apple instead broke one bad old platform into three mediocre new platforms. The move was widely panned,¹ and justifiably so. It was another wasted opportunity for a company that, by all rights, ought to be doing a whole lot better with its customers.

This isn’t to suggest that Apple is doomed to fail. It continues to be a successful product leader, but its inability to fully embrace data-driven customer-centric thinking has been one factor associated with slower growth and greater competitive vulnerability.

Starbucks and Apple are somewhat extreme examples. There are any number of companies out there that have fallen somewhere in the middle in all of this: they may have embraced customer-centric thinking in some ways, but perhaps not in others, leaving them kind of halfway committed. Nordstrom was a big target in the first edition of this book. Perhaps somewhat unfairly, I painted the upscale retailer as a somewhat Stone Age practitioner of over-the-top and largely nonstrategic customer service. This was the company that embodied, more than any other, the rather simplistic notion that the customer is always right.

And yet, even Nordstrom has taken some significant steps toward a more customer-centric future. Perhaps some of this progress was spurred by self-survival—we live in the Amazon age, after all—but it’s been heartening to see nonetheless. Indeed, the company’s Nordstrom Local initiative represents a truly innovative step forward for a firm that has rarely been thought of as a leader in customer centricity—as judged by my definition of it.

Nordstrom Local locations, most of which are stationed in high-end, high-traffic urban centers such as Hollywood and Manhattan, offer customers a range of services all under one roof—everything from styling advice to tailoring. What these locations don’t offer, interestingly, is any inventory. Customers can’t buy direct from these locations, because there are no actual products to buy there, but they can pick up online orders or place those orders there in the store. Perhaps more importantly for Nordstrom’s customer-centric efforts, customers can and do interact directly with Nordstrom staff. This allows the retailer to understand its most loyal of customers better, serve them better, and derive as much value as possible from them.

Early indications are that the strategy is working. The company, which has continued to expand its roster of Nordstrom Local locations, says the customers who visit these locations presumably spend more per transaction and buy more frequently than customers who only visit the traditional mall-based locations. Nordstrom has tapped into something important: a lifeline of its most loyal customers. And if it continues to do so, it could help the company weather the Amazon storm.

In late summer 2019, Nordstrom announced that it would accept product returns for several competing retailers in its Nordstrom Local locations. That is a nice example of customer centricity: not only is the company catering to a select group of high-value customers but it is also offering a meaningful value-added service to solidify its status as a genuine trusted advisor partner to those customers. In the long run, this tactic should (and I predict will) bolster the lifetime value of these customers and help Nordstrom acquire a better mix of valuable new ones. It has come a long way from the old apocryphal story of accepting tire returns from random customers, and I’m rooting for it as it continues to make innovative moves in this direction.

How to Read This Book

I am not here to tell you that customer centricity is a magic-bullet strategy for business success. Simply adopting the ideas I share in this book is not going to automatically create new revenue streams for your business. I believe in these ideas, and I believe in them strongly, but I also am honest in saying that implementing these strategies, and sustaining them, takes work. It takes hard work, and it takes an enduring commitment to continuing that work and always improving on it. My recognition of that fact is a big reason that, in 2018, I published a follow-up book, The Customer Centricity Playbook: Implement a Winning Strategy Driven by Customer Lifetime Value, which I co-authored with my Wharton colleague Sarah Toms.

So here’s my message to you as you dive into this book (whether for the first time or as a chance to reflect on your experiences to date): eight years after its first publication, Customer Centricity is as relevant and important as ever. With this in mind, I have made almost no changes to the text that follows—I want it to endure as a time capsule of thoughts from the dawn of the customer-centric era. Yes, there are some aspects that may seem a bit dated, embarrassing, or downright wrong (thanks to hindsight).

In Chapter 3, for instance, I’ve made a 180-degree turn on the definition and use of the phrase customer equity (CE). I’m trying to remove that phrase from the customer-centricity vocabulary. In short, it’s not really a credible concept. The finance-y part is wrong: the way we define CE is the sum of all customer lifetime values—but we ignore all fixed costs and capital structure. Anything involving equity can’t do that. Bottom line: let’s drop CE and just call it what it is—customer asset value.

But learning from the past is better than rewriting it in a favorable light. Just as I want my predictive models to be held to high standards of accountability, I feel the same way about my ideas. Please keep this in mind as you digest and evaluate the words you are about to read.

In fact, I’ll admit a mistake before we even begin. The digital and data analytics revolution that fuels customer centricity is not only well under way but zooming ahead faster and more dramatically than what I had envisioned back in 2011. More companies, large and small, than I had imagined are actively moving forward: some are still taking unsteady baby steps, and others are coming up with customer-centric solutions and strategies that seem surprising, innovative, brilliant, and sometimes quirky to me. Seeing all this progress, I remain as convinced as ever that, even if you’re late to the party, this is the book that can get you up to speed—and prepare you for long-range, sustainable success in the ever-more customer-centric world.

Peter Fader

January 2020

1. Game-Changer to Digital Dustbin: Why iTunes Is Shutting Down, Knowledge@Wharton, June 7, 2019, accessed December 12, 2019, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/itunes-shutting-down.

Introduction

Let’s start in Fairbanks, Alaska. Specifically, at the Fairbanks location of one of the most successful brands in retail: Nordstrom.

Nordstrom is a high-end retailer that, of course, sells many wonderful products. But as we all know, Nordstrom is not really famous for what it sells; it is famous for how it sells—with truly outstanding customer service. Nordstrom is known far and wide as the most customer-friendly retailer in the business, and that reputation is richly deserved. It’s also no fluke. Indeed, the company to this very day gives all new employees a one-page company handbook that very simply states, Our number one goal is to provide outstanding customer service.

Nordstrom executives demand outstanding customer service. And their employees deliver it. That’s why Nordstrom sends thank-you cards to its customers. That’s why Nordstrom clerks walk all the way around their counters to hand shoppers their bags. And that’s also why, more often than not, if you ask to return an item to Nordstrom, your request will be granted.

Which brings us back to Fairbanks and one of the most well-worn tales in all of business history—the Nordstrom tire story.

According to legend, the year was 1975, and an unhappy owner of a set of worn-down tires walked into the new Alaskan Nordstrom outpost and asked to return them. The request was an odd one for several reasons, the most notable being this: Nordstrom not only did not sell the man the tires in question, but also did not sell tires at all.

No matter, the story goes; the store granted the request anyway. And all at once, Nordstrom had a handy little story on which to hang its customer-service hat. Indeed, in the years since this story originated, company spokespeople have on several different occasions backed its authenticity.

Of course, why wouldn’t they? Every retailer wants to be known as customer friendly. Every retailer wants to be trusted. Every retailer wants to be known as the store that not only says the customer is always right, but actually believes the customer is always right. Nordstrom, apparently, is precisely that company.

But here’s what you need to understand: Nordstrom was probably wrong to do this.

Despite everything you may have ever learned about business; despite all that you’ve been told about customer relations by your bosses, peers, and mentors; and despite even your gut instinct, I am here to let you in on this little secret: the customer is not always right.

Rather, the right customers are always right. And yes, there is a difference.

Not All Customers Are Created Equal

This is not a book about customer service. This is not a book about being customer friendly either. This is a book about customer centricity. And although you may be surprised to hear it, there is nothing inherently customer centric about Nordstrom taking back a set of tires that they didn’t sell in the first place.

As you’ll learn in Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage, customer centricity is not really about being nice to your customers. It is not a philosophy. It is not something that can be fostered through a company handbook or mission statement.

Customer centricity is a strategy to fundamentally align a company’s products and services with the wants and needs of its most valuable customers. That strategy has a specific aim: more profits for the long term.

This is a goal that every business would like to achieve, of course. And it’s a goal that your company can achieve as well. But you’ll only be able to get there and put customer centricity to use if you are willing to start thinking in new—and in some cases, truly radical—ways. That starts with scrapping some old ideas about company-customer relations, and it continues with a willingness to radically rethink organizational design, performance metrics, product development, and more—all in the name of finding new and unique ways of serving the customers who matter most.

The way I see things—and the way I want you to start seeing things—is that not all customers are created equal. Not all customers deserve your company’s best efforts. And despite what that tired old adage says, the customer is most definitely not always right. Because in the world of customer centricity, there are good customers … and then there is everybody else.

That latter group shouldn’t be ignored, of course. I’m not suggesting that you ditch them, treat them shabbily, or ignore their wants and needs. I am suggesting, however, that you would be well served—and so would your stockholders—if you started spending more of your time working with the former group. Those are the customers who hold the key to your company’s long-term profitability.

Customer centricity is about identifying your most valuable customers—and then doing everything in your power to make as much money from them as possible and to find more customers like them. These customers give you a strategic advantage over your competitors; it’s a strategic advantage that could be the best path forward for many companies.

This is something that airlines and hotels have long understood. It’s something Amazon, the massive (and creative) online retailer, has understood almost from the very start, way back in 1994. Wells Fargo understands the importance of customer centricity. So, too, do the executives who run Harrah’s casinos; the powers-that-be at IBM; and maybe most especially, the leaders of British retailer Tesco, who state very openly that the data they gather from their customer-centric initiatives drive every major strategic decision they make. As this list suggests, there is great variety in the types of companies (and industries) that have put customer-centric practices into use, but these customer-centric savvy companies are hardly in the majority; they are the exception, not the rule.

Although the idea of customer centricity has been around for years (decades, really, as you’ll learn later in this chapter) and although customer centricity has been proven in practice to be an incredibly effective means of maximizing customer lifetime value (you’ll learn more about this later also), a shocking number of really well-run companies still don’t seem the least bit interested in building a customer-centric culture, even though doing so would very clearly be to their benefit.

Costco, which has been helping its customers save pennies for years, isn’t truly customer centric. Apple, which was recently named as the most valuable brand in the world, isn’t customer centric—at least not yet. Walmart isn’t customer centric. Starbucks isn’t customer centric. And no matter what your gut may tell you, Nordstrom—sainted, famously customer-friendly Nordstrom—isn’t truly customer centric either.

A Path to Customer Centricity

The aim of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage is simple: to give you a clear and concise understanding of what customer centricity is and isn’t; to help you understand why a customer-centric outlook might prove crucial to your bottom-line success in today’s superfast, super-competitive environment; and to guide you around the pitfalls that other companies have faced when attempting to implement customer-centric initiatives.

The topics I’ll cover include the following:

Why the traditional means of doing business—the product-centric approach—is more vulnerable than ever before.

How the strategies underlying customer centricity can help companies gain a competitive advantage in today’s challenging business environment.

How some cutting-edge companies and leading business minds are rethinking the idea of equity—and how the ideas of brand equity and customer equity help us understand what kinds of companies naturally lend themselves to the customer-centric model and which ones don’t.

Why the traditional models for determining the value of individual customers (something we call customer lifetime value, or CLV) are flawed—and how a rather simple tweak to that model can deliver a much more accurate picture of what individual customers and entire customer bases are really worth.

How executives can use CLV and other customer-centric data to make smarter decisions about their companies.

How the well-intended idea of customer relationship management (CRM) lost its way—and how your company can properly put CRM to use.

This book will give you the knowledge and tools you need to succeed in a world that, in the years to come, may well demand a customer-centric approach. In other words, by the time you’re done reading this book, you’ll be ahead of the game. It’s a game that has been in the works for decades now. In fact, I should point out that there is nothing necessarily new about customer centricity—or at the very least, nothing new about the ideas on which it is built. The roots of customer centricity can be traced all the way back to the late 1960s, when a relatively obscure ad agency executive by the name of Lester Wunderman gave birth to the idea that we know today as direct marketing. Many of the concepts you’ll read about in this book, including the basic overarching notion that businesses would be well served to know absolutely everything about their best customers, are derived in some way from the ideas of Wunderman, who understood long before anyone else the value of keeping records (frighteningly detailed records, actually) about customer buying habits.

What is new, however, is the competitive landscape and the incredibly demanding world in which you and your company are doing business. Today, more than ever before, many companies need customer centricity. They need it to compete in the short term and thrive in the long term.

The world has changed dramatically in the decades since Henry Ford first proved the viability of the tried-and-true product-centric business model—the model we’ll explore in detail in chapter 1. That model worked wonderfully in the 1920s, and indeed, it still works pretty well today. It is not my contention that the product-centric model is broken; rather, I simply believe the product-centric model is no longer enough in many situations.

Technology, deregulation, globalization, and other factors have conspired to rob even the most wildly successful product-centric companies of the full set of inherent advantages that used to arise automatically from a well-executed product-centric strategy. Technological barriers have been broken down. Geographic barriers are all but nonexistent. But what remains are the relationships that companies have—or don’t have—with their customers.

Most companies have been able to get by without customer centricity in the past. Many may be able to get by without customer centricity today. And some will be able to get by without customer centricity for years to come. But most companies in most sectors probably won’t be able to get by without customer centricity forever, so they might as well start moving in this direction sooner rather than later.

I believe the companies that will enjoy the most success in the years and decades to come will be the companies that dedicate the resources necessary to not only understand their most loyal and committed customers, but also make the effort to then serve these valuable customers—and serve them in a way that will not only make them feel special but also maximize their value to the company. Make no mistake: your competitors want to steal your customers, and