Define what do you understand by customer value chain?

The customer look out for 'More Value For The money' Spent by them. Therefore, a Manufacturer / supplier has to consistently strive to keep the Customers satisfied by offering better services from time to time. Even/possible area needs to be explored to achieve this goal. The primary goal should perhaps be to ensure an optimal flow from transportation flow from transportation services provider to the internal clients and see to it that every task directly adds value to the outcome.

The goal of supply chain management is to link the ultimate consumer, the supplier of original materials and all trading partners in between with a seamless information flow. To add value to the chain, there has to be a high level of uninterrupted data stream from raw materials to the consumer hands. Data should actually be available real time, on time.

Value-chain analysis looks at every step a business goes through, from raw materials to the eventual end-user. The goal is to deliver maximum value for the least possible total cost

The Customer Chain is a visual mapping design tool used at the start of a product development process that enables design teams to identify pertinent stakeholders and their relationships to the product or process being designed.

The stakeholders, or customers, are all important parties who are involved with the effective.

The big difference is that while a supply chain often measures costs, the customer value chain is based on the increase in value to the end user.

Best Regards

A value chain is a chain of activities that a firm operates in a specific industry performs in order to deliver a valuable product or service for the market. The concept comes from business management and was first described and popularized by Michael Porter in his1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.

The idea of the value chain is based on the process view of organizations, the idea of seeing a manufacturing (or service) organization as a system, made up of subsystems each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Inputs, transformation processes, and outputs involve the acquisition and consumption of resources - money, labour, materials, equipment, buildings, land, administration and management. How value chain activities are carried out determines costs and affects profits.

The concept of value chains as decision support tools, was added onto the competitive strategies paradigm developed by Porter as early as1979.[dubious – discuss]In Porter's value chains, Inbound Logistics, Operations, Outbound Logistics, Marketing and Sales and Service are categorized as primary activities. Secondary activities include Procurement, Human Resource management, Technological Development and Infrastructure (Porter1985, pp. 11–15).

According to the OECD Secretary-General (Gurría2012)the emergence of global value chains (GVCs) in the late1990s provided a catalyst for accelerated change in the landscape of international investment and trade, with major, far-reaching consequences on governments as well as enterprises (Gurría2012).

A customer value chain is a business concept that represents the creation of value for a customer. It is similar to the supply chain, which charts the various stages of production and supply from raw materials to the sale of the final good to the end user. 

A customer value chain is a business concept that represents the creation of value for a customer

value chain process of a company that add value to an article ,production marketing ,proision to after sales..

What I understand about customer value chain, without reviewing any of the previously applied answers is that the company seeks to review its strengths and weaknesses in a type of SWOT analysis and then by process of elimination optimizes on the company's strengths to provide the best CUSTOMER RELATED SERVICES; so for example:Company has advantage over its competitors that it has the most branches and country wide spread of services; then it would see this as a "STRENGTH"

Company also has noted from market research that it has highest market share in these locations it has branches.

So management might take decision to not open further branches, but rather open longer hours or open on weekends to provide more opportunity to its customers to receive services.

None value added services will be identified and discontinued if this service is not be utilized.  This will reduce costs and saved budget may be applied where services are utilized.

Value chain is the mix of many processes, that are combined to deliver value to customer in form of product or service. To customer, value means worth for his money. Purpose of analysing value chain is to identify and differentiate cost and it's centre and to evaluate, whether it creates value, because an organization is considered successful if value created is higher than it's cost. 

Thus an organization needs to improve it's primary activities, because by making them unique it can gain competitive advantage. 

Primary activities like processing / production / packaging, distribution and marketing and service that is to say all activities that convert raw material into valuable thing/service for customer and bring it to his knowledge, and make him feel that he can carry on with product after it's breakage etc. While secondary activities like accountancy software, legal counselling, maintenance etc   help in creating value BUT ARE NOT NECESSARY.

It a circular process of collecting data from customers,analysis of data and making a test of the data, your action would be offers, pricing and policy,customer services,after you need to collect data from customer response, financial impacts and the result on actual and predictive simulations.the you can compare results and collect again data for the next cycle of Customer Value Chain.

It is similar to Value Stream mapping where in each part of its production process is verfiied and identifying where steps can be eliminated or improvements can be made