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.     

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.     

Smart customers, dumb companies

Customers today are being bombarded with an overwhelming array of choices. To alleviate customer frustration, say Steven Cristol and Peter Sealey in Simplicity Marketing, companies should stop creating new brands and product extensions. Better to consolidate product and service functions by following a four R approach: replace, repackage, reposition, and replenish. That's an outmoded, dictatorial view of markets, says Christopher Locke. Far from being stymied by choices, customers are rapidly becoming smarter than the companies that pretend to serve them. In this networked economy, people are talking among themselves, and that changes everything. Locke predicts we'll see a growing number of well-defined micromarkets--groups of customers converging in real time around entertaining and knowledgeable voices--such as NPR's car guys and the Motley Fool investment site. "Micromedia" Web sites will replace traditional advertising because they'll provide credible user-supplied news about products and services. Locke contends that an open exchange of information solves the "problem" of choice much better than manipulative strategies like simplicity or even permission marketing. Companies can participate in micromarkets through what Locke dubs "gonzo marketing." If Ford, for example, discovers that a subset of its employees are organic gardeners, it may offer support to a big independent organic-gardening Web site with donations and employee volunteers. This marketing effort would be driven not by advertising managers but by people with genuine interest in each micromarket, so it would have credibility with customers. With gonzo marketing, both companies and their markets will benefit.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

如何进行信用卡客户细分

在竞争激烈的信用卡市场中,客户不仅是发卡行销售和服务的对象,而且是其竞争的资本,是在竞争中取胜的关键.商业银行在市场竞争中获胜所需的要素组合,如资源、人力、资本、信息等都可以很快地被竞争对手模仿复制,但是,良好的客户关系是竞争对手模仿不了的.由于计算机技术和通信技术的发展,交易双方的信息不对称程度在逐渐降低,买方的选择也因此而不断丰富和复杂,他们可以最大限度地了解市场上的产品和服务的信息,并根据自己所掌握的信息来选择所需要的最好的产品和服务.     

Companies and the customers who hate them

Why do companies bind customers with contracts, bleed them with fees, and baffle them with fine print? Because bewildered customers, who often make bad purchasing decisions, can be highly profitable. Most firms that profit from customers' confusion are on a slippery slope. Over time, their customer-centric strategies for delivering value have evolved into company-centric strategies for extracting it. Not surprisingly, when a rival comes along with a friendlier alternative, customers defect. Adversarial value-extracting strategies are common in such industries as cell phone service, retail banking, and health clubs. Overly complex product and pricing options, for example, may have been designed to serve various segments. But in fact they take advantage of how difficult it is for customers to predict their needs (such as how many cell phone minutes they'll use each month) and make it hard for them to choose the right product. Similarly, penalties and fees, which may have been instituted to offset the costs of undesirable customer behavior, like bouncing checks, turn out to be very profitable. As a result, companies have no incentive to help customers avoid them. Tactics like these generate bad publicity and fuel customer defections, creating opportunities for competitors. Virgin Mobile USA, for example, has lured millions of angry cell phone customers away from the incumbents by offering a straightforward plan with no hidden fees, no time-of-day restrictions, and no contracts. ING Direct, now the fourth-largest thrift bank in the United States, offers accounts with no fees, no tiered interest rates, and no minimums. In industries where squeezing value from customers is commonplace, companies that dismantle these harmful practices and design a transparent, value-creating offer can head off customer retaliation and spur rapid growth.     

Get inside the lives of your customers

Many companies have become adept at the art of customer relationship management. They've collected mountains of data on preferences and behavior, divided buyers into ever-finer segments, and refined their products, services, and marketing pitches. But all too often those efforts are too narrow--they concentrate only on the points where the customer comes into contact with the company. Few businesses have bothered to look at what the author calls the customer scenario--the broad context in which customers select, buy, and use products and services. As a result, consultant Patricia Seybold maintains, they've routinely missed chances to deepen loyalty and expand sales. In this article, the author shows how effective three very different companies have been at using customer scenarios as the centerpiece of their marketing plans. Chip maker National Semiconductor looked beyond the purchasing agents that buy in bulk to find ways to make it easier for engineers to design National's components into their specifications for mobile telephones. Each time they do so, it translates into millions of dollars in orders. By developing a customer scenario that describes how people actually shop for groceries, Tesco learned the importance of decentralizing its Web shopping site and how the extra costs of decentralization could be outweighed by the higher profit margins on-line customers generate. And Buzzsaw.com used customer scenarios as the basis for its entire business. It has used the Web to create a better way for the dozens of participants in a construction project to share their drawings and manage their projects. Seybold lays out the steps managers can take to develop their own customer scenarios. By thinking broadly about the challenges your customers face, she suggests, you can almost always find ways to make their lives easier--and thus earn their loyalty.     

Helping bank customers switch: A case study

Despite a reasonable level of competition in the New Zealand banking market, there is a relatively low rate of customers switching between banks. A common reason cited for the low churn rate is the costs associated with switching between financial institutions, including simply the difficulties associated with the physical transfer of existing banking arrangements. One non-bank financial institution, PSIS, introduced a pilot scheme to make it easier for existing customers of other financial institutions to move their banking facilities to PSIS. The pilot sought to understand the extent to which the switching costs associated with changing financial institutions could be reduced, and the impact that had on customers' switching behaviour. The results of this pilot scheme did not meet the organisation's expectations, and as a result, was not extended beyond the pilot period or the pilot participants. This paper provides a review of the pilot scheme, and attempts to identify the issues that contributed to the lack of success. The key findings were that there was no real demand from customers for the type of service offered, and that the time and effort involved on the part of the financial institution were greater than expected, making it undesirable to continue.     

银行企业客户交易中的行业关联分析

本文根据数据挖掘技术中的多层关联规则方法,提出了建立银行交易中的行业间关联规则的基本思想。给出基于多层行业分类表、银行企业客户信息和大额历史交易数据的行业间关联规则的建立过程。本文目的是为了通过建立行业间关联规则发现那些原本关联度很小的可疑银行交易,为银行反洗钱技术提供参考。     

Getting the most out of all your customers

Companies spend billions of dollars on direct marketing, targeting individual customers with ever more accuracy. Yet despite the power of the myriad data-collecting and analytical tools at their disposal, they're still having trouble optimizing their direct-marketing investments. Many marketers try to minimize costs by pursuing only those customers who are cheap to find and cheap to keep. Others try to get the most customers they possibly can and keep all of them for as long as they can. But a customer need not be loyal to be highly profitable, and many loyal customers turn out to be highly unprofitable. Companies can get more out of direct marketing if they see it as a single system for generating profits than if they try to maximize performance measures at each stage of the process. This article describes a tool for doing just that. Called ARPRO (Allocating Resources for Profits), the tool is essentially a complex regression analysis that can estimate the impact of a company's direct-marketing investments on the profitability of its customer pool. With data that companies already gather, the tool can show managers how much to spend on acquisition versus retention and even what percentage of their funds they should allocate to the different direct-marketing channels. Using the model, companies can easily see that even small deviations from the optimal levels of customer profitability are expensive. Applying it to one catalog retailer showed, for instance, that a 10% reduction in marketing costs would lead to a 1.8 million dollar drop in long-term customer profits. Conversely, spending 69% less on marketing would actually increase average customer profitability at one B2B service provider by 42%. What's more, the tool can show that finding the optimal balance between investments in acquisition and retention can be more important than finding the optimum amount to invest overall.     

产品创新:为行业客户带来厚重价值体验——访三星电子中国总部营销副总裁曲敬东

行业市场一直是商家必争之地，尤其是政府、金融、电信等领域，为其提供产品和服务的品牌厂商高手林立。如果缺乏创新，不能提供领先的技术，不能及时推出一系列的一流产品与解决方案，就不可能在激烈的行业市场竞争中取得一席之地。三星自2005年全面正式进入中国行业市场以来，通过为行业大客户量体裁衣、度身定制的解决方案和市场策略，在众多领域都取得了不俗的业绩。     

Beyond state-owned banks: Evidence from Shanghai bank customers

In light of a reformed and liberalized banking sector in China, this article sets out to examine the role of socio-demographic factors and customers’ banking experiences and priorities in customers’ selection of banks. As state-owned banks have long dominated the banking industry, the article also investigates the receptiveness of the Shanghai Chinese towards newer commercial banks, such as the joint-stock banks, and the penetration of foreign banks into China's banking industry. Comparing customers who use state-owned banks only and those who patronize joint-stock banks, it is found that education, income, age, occupation sector and location of hometown affects customers of state-owned banks only. Further, it is also found that state-owned banks remain dominant despite the opening up of the banking sector, and perception towards state-owned banks remains favourable.     

Identifying potential millennial customers for financial institutions using SVM

Journal of Financial Services Marketing - In order to survive in this complex economic business environment with fierce competition among various players of the finance sector, the need is to...     

Satisfaction drivers for Internet service technology among stock brokerage customers in Thailand

Many financial services firms are offering the Internet as a self-service technology (SST), for online stock trading, in an effort to increase effciency and give customers greater access. It is important to understand how this technology will influence customer satisfaction. This paper reports results of exploratory research to identify sources of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the service encounter in Thai stockbrokerage firms. Results show that customers and service providers determine sources of customer dis/satisfaction differently, depending on whether the service encounter is technology-based or interpersonal. Different customer profiles give rise to segmentation in response to the use of Internet technology in this industry.     

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...