Hedging customers

You are a marketing director with $5 million to invest in customer acquisition and retention. Which customers do you acquire, and which do you retain? Up to a point, the choice is obvious: Keep the consistent big spenders and lose the erratic small ones. But what about the erratic big spenders and the consistent small ones? It's often unclear whether you should acquire or retain them and at what cost. Businesses have begun dealing with unpredictable customer behavior by following the practices of sophisticated investors who own portfolios comprising dozens of stocks with different, indeed divergent, histories and prospects. Each portfolio is diversified so as to produce the investor's desired returns at the particular level of uncertainty he or she can tolerate. Customers, too, are assets--risky assets. As with stocks, the cost of acquiring them is supposed to reflect the cash-flow values they are likely to generate. The authors explain how to construct a portfolio based on the notion that a customer's risk-adjusted lifetime value depends on its anticipated effect on the riskiness of the group it is joining. They also show how this approach was used to identify the best prospects for Myron Corporation, a global leader in the personalized business-gift industry. The concept of risk-adjusted lifetime value has a transforming power: For companies that rely on it, product managers will be replaced by customer managers, and the current method of accounting for profit and loss--which is by product--will be replaced by one that determines each customer's P&L. Once adjusted for risk, those P&Ls will become the firm's key performance and operational metric.     

Government customers,institutional investment horizons,and liquidity risk

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - Contributing to the literature on government suppliers’ market risk and liquidity, we document a negative association between the government...     

Clueing in customers

Leonard L. Berry and Neeli Bendapudi When customers lack the expertise to judge a company's offerings, they naturally turn detective, scrutinizing people, facilities, and processes for evidence of quality. The Mayo Clinic understands this and carefully manages that evidence to convey a simple, consistent message: The needs of the patient come first. From the way it hires and trains employees to the way it designs its facilities and approaches its care, the Mayo Clinic provides patients and their families concrete evidence of its strengths and values, an approach that has allowed it to build what is arguably the most powerful brand in health care. Marketing professors Leonard Berry and Neeli Bendapudi conducted a five-month study of evidence management at the Mayo Clinic. They interviewed more than 1,000 patients and employees, observed hundreds of doctor visits, traveled in the Mayo helicopter, and stayed in the organization's many hospitals. Their experiences led them to identify best practices applicable to just about any company, in particular those that sell intangible or technically complex products. Essentially, the authors say, companies need to determine what story they want to tell, then ensure that their employees and facilities consistently show customers evidence of that story. At Mayo, the evidence falls into three categories: people, collaboration, and tangibles. The clinic systematically hires people who espouse its values, and its incentive and reward systems promote collaborative care focused on the patient's needs. The physical environment is explicitly designed for its intended effect on the patient experience. In almost every interaction, an organization's message comes through. "Patients first," the Mayo Clinic's message, is not the only story a medical organization could tell, but the way in which Mayo manages evidence to communicate this message is an example to be followed.     

Segmenting retail banking customers

The desire to treat all customers equally, irrespective of their value to the organisation reflects the laudable but uneconomic service mantras of the past. New Zealand banks, using modern database management tools in conjunction with individual customer information, are migrating customers to cheaper delivery systems and adjusting their customer service levels (customer support, privileges, fee waivers, discounts, etc) according to customer profitability. The essence of this database management is still customer segmentation. Using a retail bank's proprietary customer contribution data in combination with survey-based customer data, this paper presents a quantitative eight segment ‘extension’ of Reinartz and Kumar's (2002) behavioural segmentation solution. Potential profitability in the customer-bank relationship is drawn from incorporation of share of wallet into the segmentation solution, providing insight into the management of each segment's customers, especially the ‘barnacles’ (loyal, loss-making customers) and the ‘butterflies’ (short-term, profitable customers).     

实实在在服务高端客户——访中国民生银行信用卡中心总裁高级助理陈大鹏

在商业银行愈演愈烈的高端客户争夺战中,与一些银行通过降低信用额度、减免年费等措施扩大市场份额的做法不同,民生银行始终坚持塑造顶级品牌的理念,通过为持卡人提供更多的增值服务吸引和挽留客户.中国民生银行信用卡中心总裁高级助理陈大鸱认为,实实在在的服务是民生高端信用卡最大的特色.     

Bringing customers into the boardroom

Misguided marketing strategies have destroyed more shareholder value than shoddy accounting or shady fiscal practices. Yet marketing functions typically reside deep in the organization, far from the executive suite and boardroom, and they are often poorly aligned with corporate strategy. Boards of directors, it would seem, have compelling reasons to monitor their companies' marketing activities. The authors argue that boards lack a clear understanding of how their companies are meeting customers' needs and how their marketing strategies drive (or often fail to drive) top-line growth. To help remedy that problem, they've devised a "marketing dashboard," a series of management reports that could give the board this critical knowledge. The dashboard has three parts, each of which the board should review regularly. The first part tracks the company's main business drivers--those business conditions that, when manipulated or otherwise changed, will directly and predictably affect the company's performance. The second part describes the specific innovations in a pipeline of growth ideas that will allow the company to reach its short- and long-term revenue goals. And the third part provides an overview of the company's marketing skill set so the board can determine not only if the company has enough marketing talent but also if it has the right marketing talent. Unlike isolated measures of marketing performance that are often insufficient, irrelevant, or misleading, the dashboard allows the board to quickly and routinely assess the effectiveness of its company's marketing strategies. Armed with a clear understanding of marketing's role and performance, the board can expose inadequate marketing campaigns, direct management to address the problem, and monitor progress.     

Winning the battle for customers

A financial organisation's ability to retain its customer franchise faces ever-greater challenges from new competitors in the market-place, both locally and globally. Retention is not just a function of keeping customers happy. More than ever, organisations need to know what risks they run of losing customers: which customers, how many and why. Additionally, both the new players in the market and the traditional players need to know how and where they can win new customers. This paper focuses on a new approach to these issues based on global findings. The focus is on the UK banking industry, comparing the new players in the market using direct channels with the traditional high street banks.     

为客户提供个性化账单——浙江工行成功应用惠普打印封装一体系统

2003年6月,浙江工行营业部的部分信用卡客户拿到了比以往更加美观的账单信件。对于浙江工行服务部门来说,意味着在客户服务上迈出了个性化服务的一大步。原有方案存在的问题浙江工行营业部原来采用高速行打来完成账单的打印,然后再进行专门的封装程序。随着业务量的增长,打印速     

Targeting customers based on economic worth

A common objective for many financial service companies today is to focus on their best customers and to align their investment in customers based on the economic worth of the customers. Yet, as simple and practical as this seems, many companies have not been able to implement the tools and processes that will allow them to do this effectively. One tool that helps identify the economic worth of customers is ‘grading’. Grading is a powerful tool that helps companies manage customer relationships based on economic worth. While there are several grading methodologies and many variations within these methodologies, the best approach is one that is tailored to a company's specific situation and one that is capable of being implemented. By using grading in combination with other tools and processes, financial service firms can target their customers more economically, reduce customer defection and increase revenue.     

The quality improvement customers didn't want

Is investing in new technology always the right choice for a company and its customers? Allan Moulter, the CEO of Quality Care, isn't sure he wants to invest in the computerized reception system that consultant Jack Zadow has outlined for him. But in this HBR case study, the argument Zadow makes is impossible to ignore. Quality Care's rivals have invested in similar systems or are planning to do so. The new system promises to take care of routine busywork, freeing staff up for other interactions with patients. It seems as if the competition hasn't even cut staff and is counting on increased customer retention to pay for the investment. And yet, Quality Care's surveys of its own customers show that they prefer the human touch when checking in. How would customers feel if the first ?person? they met when they came in the door turned out to be a machine? Moulter prides himself on his responsiveness to customers. And with 86% of Quality Care's customers either satisfied or completely satisfied, aren't things fine as they are? Has Moulter considered all the facets of his predicament? How will Quality Care's staff be affected by a decision one way or another? What about the costs of upgrading the system? Can Quality Care maintain its standing without going high-tech? Would customers rebel when confronted with the proposed reception area or would they appreciate the increased efficiency? Six experts weigh the costs and benefits of technology in a service industry.     

Strategic integration of customers and channels

The challenge for financial services organisations is to understand the impact that new channels will have on their existing branch network and customer base both now and in the future. This paper offers a practical approach to understanding the steps involved and introduces two new market-specific tools designed to aid financial services organisations in quantifying this demand. The paper concludes by looking at trends in channel management and channel integration with specific reference to the US asset management marketplace.     

“以大代小”火力发电企业的价值评估

在火力发电行业进行“以大代小”技改工程后,为了解决“一厂多制”的问题,需要对完成“以大代小”技改项目后所产生的新发电企业进行价值评估。在评估过程中,应明确价值类型,充分考虑租赁的资产、委托运行维护管理等要素对企业价值的影响。本文对大型火电发电机组的生命周期进行了分析,并在此基础上提出了对“以大代小”新火力发电企业进行收益测算的“三阶段测算模型”。     

贴近客户业务需求支持银行业创新发展——中钞科堡现金处理技术(北京)有限公司常务副总经理余岱芳访谈

最近几年,国内自助金融服务市场一直处于竞争非常激烈的状态,全球金融危机的到来使得这一领域的生存环境更为艰难,自助设备厂商面临的市场形势也更为严峻.     

How to acquire customers on the Web

Most retailers on the Web spend more to acquire customers than they will ever get back in revenue from them. Many think that sky-high spending on marketing is necessary to stake out their share of Internet space. But is it really? How do retailers know how much to pay? Consider CDnow, which has developed a multifaceted customer-acquisition strategy that reflects a clear understanding of the economics of an on-line business. At the heart of its strategy is affiliate marketing, a concept the company pioneered. Under its BuyWeb program, anyone can put a link to CDnow on his or her Web site, and if a customer uses that link to arrive at CDnow and make a purchase, the referring site owner gets a percentage of the sale. CDnow pays no money if no sale is made, which makes the marketing program completely efficient. But CDnow didn't stop there. Being a Web store, it had complete data on the number of visitors to its site and what they bought, which it used to work out the lifetime value of an average customer. CDnow used that figure to determine how much to wager on the expensive and risky world of traditional advertising to reach a wider audience that wasn't already on-line. CDnow's experience, still a work in progress, contradicts John Wanamaker's oft-quoted lament: "I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half." As the CDnow example demonstrates, there is a way to find out which half really works.     

Corporate suppliers and customers and accounting conservatism

We argue that a firm's suppliers and customers prefer it to account more conservatively due to information asymmetry and these stakeholders' asymmetric payoffs with respect to the firm's performance. We predict that a firm meets this demand for accounting conservatism when suppliers or customers have bargaining advantages over it that enable them to dictate terms of trade or whether trade occurs at all. We show that when a firm's suppliers or customers have greater bargaining power, the firm recognizes losses more quickly. Our findings provide insights into how a firm's powerful suppliers and customers are associated with its accounting practices and also support the contracting explanation for accounting conservatism.     

Nonprofits: check your attention to customers

Nonprofit organizations chronically face financial difficulties. Now the situation has worsened because they are being squeezed between the uncertain economic climate and cutbacks in government support. While the managers of these institutions may think that they have already tried everything possible, more than ever they must be innovative in developing additional funding sources. As Mr. Andreasen argues, most nonprofits have failed to exploit marketing techniques which can build support from users or customers that leads to improved cash flow. The author contends that managers of nonprofit organizations focus too closely on their products or services; he admonishes them to give more attention to the needs and wants of their consumers.     

Major government customers and loan contract terms

Review of Accounting Studies - We examine the relation between the presence of U.S. government as a major customer and a supplier firm’s loan contract terms, using major corporate customers...