Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value From Your Scarcest Resource - Hardcover

Peppers, Don; Rogers, Martha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385510306 ISBN 13: 9780385510301

Publisher: Crown Business, 2005

Synopsis

Internationally acclaimed business gurus and best-selling authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers kicked off the CRM revolution and changed the landscape of business competition with their classic bestseller, The One to One Future. Now, in Return on Customer, they have written an even more revolutionary book, redefining the very concept of what it means to be “profitable” as a business.

Virtually every manager agrees that a company’s most vital asset is its customer base – the lifetime values of all its current and future customers. Yet when companies track their financial results, they rarely take into account any change in the value of this critical asset. As a result, managers remain blind to one of the most significant factors driving genuine, lasting business success, and instead become preoccupied with achieving short-term financial goals.

Return on Customer is the first book to focus on how firms create value, not just by driving current profits, but by preserving and increasing customer lifetime value. In a powerful blend of theory and practice, Peppers and Rogers demonstrate how to create shareholder value more efficiently by concentrating on Return on Customer(SM), a revolutionary business metric focused on a company’s scarcest resource – customers. By paying close attention to Return on Customer, companies can improve their profits while still conserving and replenishing long-term enterprise value.

Relying on their years of experience working with many of the world’s leading companies, Peppers and Rogers take readers far beyond marketing, sales, and service. Return on Customer will revolutionize how companies think about their basic competitive strategy, product development efforts, and even the issue of business ethics and corporate governance.

Return on Customer(SM) is a registered service mark of Peppers & Rogers Group, a division of Carlson Marketing Group, Inc.

“To remain competitive, you must figure out how to keep your customers longer, grow them into bigger customers, make them more profitable, and serve them more efficiently. And you want more of them.

Unfortunately, the financial metrics you learned in business school are not easily adapted to account for the value companies generate from this scarce resource, with the right balance between current-period sales and customer lifetime value. But striking that balance is necessary if you want to know whether you’re better off investing in customer acquisition, or in product development, or opening new stores, or plant efficiency, or better qualified personnel, or more service, or cost reduction. While you may believe in your heart that a particular decision creates shareholder value, there’s no financial metric currently available to tell you how much shareholder value you actually created, or even whether you created any at all.

But Return on Customer can help you. Return on Customer is a breakthrough financial metric that can quantify the actual shareholder value you are creating (or, possibly, destroying) with your various business actions and initiatives.”

—from Return on Customer

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

Virtually everyone agrees that a company's most important asset is the value of its customer base. Yet the value of this vital asset is routinely ignored in managers' day-to-day, quarter-by-quarter planning. RETURN ON CUSTOMER is the first book to focus on assessing and tracking customer equity, the lifetime value of a firm's current and future customers, and taking specific actions in every facet of the company to increase that equity.

First, Peppers and Rogers reveal the critical importance of measuring customers' long-term profitability, productivity, and loyalty. In a powerful blend of theory and practice, the authors use their years of consulting expertise with many of the world's leading companies to identify the specific products, add-ons, and services that will best increase the size and value of their customer base. They look at popular marketing techniques--such as the relentless use of telemarketing--and weigh their effectiveness in maximizing, or hindering, return on customer. Finally, they guide managers through the specific strategies that will help to conserve and replenish customer value, from marketing and sales to research and development, distribution, technology investment, and more.

As revolutionary as Peppers and Rogers' pioneering bestseller The One to One Future, RETURN ON CUSTOMER offers a dramatic new way to make customer retention and value part of a company's core competitive advantage.

About the Author:

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D., are the founding partners of Peppers & Rogers Group, the world’s most respected management consulting firm concentrating on customer issues, now a division of Carlson Marketing Group, Inc.. They are the coauthors of the best-selling “one to one” series of business books, including The One to One Future, Enterprise One to One, The One to One Fieldbook (with Bob Dorf), The One to One Manager, and One to One B2B. In addition, they have written a comprehensive graduate-level textbook on CRM, Managing Customer Relationships, used in colleges and universities around the globe.

About this edition

• Publisher: Crown Business
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0385510306
• ISBN 13: 9780385510301
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304