Book excerpt: Struggling to ensure that the customer is at the center of all your business does? This book is your guide to putting the "customer" in customer experience. Not sure what that means? Well, for starters, too many executives believe they are delighting their customers. Why wouldn't they think that?! When they focus on growth, those customer acquisition numbers are pretty sweet, but they don't tell the real story. Prioritizing customer retention is critical. But you can't just throw technology at it, give it some lip service, and call it a day. Retention is hard work! You've got to understand who your customers are and what problems they are trying to solve or what jobs they are trying to do. Then you've got to use that understanding to design an experience that helps customers achieve their goals. That's the key to putting the customer in customer experience! Ultimately, you need to bring the customer voice into all meetings, decisions, processes, and designs. The customer must be at the center of all you do. After all, it's all about the customer! In this book, I cover the three approaches to customer understanding: surveys and data, personas, and journey mapping. I could've written the whole book about journey mapping, but there's so much more to building a customer-centric business than journey mapping. The culture must first be deliberately designed to put the customer at the heart of the business. And all foundational elements of a CX transformation must be in place to make that happen. With that knowledge, read this book and: Learn about the three approaches you must use to understand your customers, why you must use them, and how they work together. Create an action plan to ensure insights gleaned from these three approaches are implemented in your organization. Develop and assign personas to your customers in order to better understand their needs, goals, problems to solve, and jobs to be done. Learn the difference between touchpoint maps and journey maps and how touchpoint maps can still be a valuable asset in your customer experience toolbox. Understand why journey mapping is called the backbone of customer experience management - and how to make it so in your organization. Set up and facilitate your own current-state and future-state journey mapping workshops with customers. Set up and facilitate service blueprint workshops with internal stakeholders. Find out how to put the customer at the heart of your business. And more!