Customer Value Management Optimizing the Value of the Firm’S Customer Base
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f a s t forward CUST O M E R V A L U E M A N A G E M E N T Customer and prospect data analysis should drive customer acquisition, retention, and expansion efforts, say Peter Verhoef and Katherine Lemon. Here, they outline critical lessons and emerging challenges for managers seeking to manage customers for value. Customer Value Management Optimizing the value of the firm’s customer base Peter C. Verhoef and Katherine N. Lemon MARKETING SCIENCE I N S TITUTE About the Authors Peter C. Verhoef is Professor of Marketing at the Department of Market- ing, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where he is also the research director and founder of the Customer Insights Center. His research interests are customer manage- ment, customer loyalty, multichannel issues, marketing strategy, category management, and sustainability. His work has appeared in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Marketing Science, Inter- national Journal of Research in Marketing, Marketing Letters, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Journal of Retailing. Verhoef’s best article awards include the Donald R. Lehmann Award in 2003 and the Harold M. Maynard Award in 2009. He is currently an editorial board member of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Retailing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Service Research, and Journal of Interactive Marketing and an area editor for the International Journal of Research in Marketing. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2001 at the School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He can be reached at [email protected]. Katherine (Kay) Lemon holds the Accenture Professorship at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management. Lemon’s main areas of research expertise are customer management, customer equity, and the dynamics of customer-firm relationships. She has published over 50 articles in journals and books including the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Marketing, Marketing Science, Management Science, and the Journal of Service Research. She has received several best article awards, including the Sheth Foundation/Journal of Marketing Award in 2009. She is the editor of the Journal of Service Research, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and Journal of Interactive Marketing. She is an Academic Trustee of the Marketing Science Institute. Lemon received her Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley. Prior to her academic career, she held senior-level marketing positions in high technology and health care. She can be reached at [email protected]. Copyright © 2011 Peter C. Verhoef and Katherine N. Lemon Published by the Marketing Science Institute 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 Printed in the United States of America ISBN-10 0-9823877-5-X ISBN-13 978-0-9823877-4-0 All rights reserved. No portion of this report may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the Institute and the authors. Design by Kennard Design f a s t forward CUST O M E R V A L U E M ANAGEMENT Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 3 Customer Value Management Process .................................................................... 5 Six Lessons on Customer Value Management ....................................................... 6 Lesson 1: Use CVM to improve business performance ................................................................. 6 Lesson 2: Focus on the customer side of CVM ........................................................................... 7 Lesson 3: Adopt customer lifetime value as a core metric ........................................................... 8 Lesson 4: Invest in strong customer intelligence capabilities ......................................................... 9 Lesson 5: Understand the drivers of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion ..................... 10 Lesson 6: Manage your channels to create customer value ........................................................11 Future Developments in Customer Value Management .......................................13 Development 1: Managing customer engagement .....................................................................13 Development 2: Managing customer networks .........................................................................15 Development 3: Managing the customer experience ................................................................ 15 Concluding Thoughts ...................................................................................................... 17 References.................................................................................................................................18 Additional References .................................................................................................................19 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................. 20 1 f a s t forward CUST O M E R V A L U E M A N A GEMENT Introduction key development in marketing and management practice in the last decade has been the growth of customer relationship management (CRM). Many firms have invested in large customer databases to understand, monitor, and influence customer behavior. One critical aspect of CRM is customer value, the economic value of the customer relationship to the firm. In this report, we focus on Acustomer value management (CVM), which we define as the optimization of the value of a company’s customer base. CVM focuses on the analysis of individual data on prospects and customers. The resulting information is used to acquire and retain customers and to drive customer behavior with marketing strategies such that the value of all current and future customers is optimized. CVM has conceptual roots in relationship marketing, which focuses on measuring constructs, such as commitment and trust, that create successful customer relationships. Traditional relationship marketing research did not consider customer data to be a critical component of relationship marketing efforts. Thus, CVM enriches this framework by focusing on the analysis of customer data and on explicitly seeking data- driven ways to enhance customer value. Advances in technology—enabling firms to build large customer databases with real-time access at customer touch points—and the development of software to analyze these data have accelerated interest in and application of CVM. Capital One, Harrah’s Entertainment, IBM, U.K.-based retailer Tesco, and the Dutch mobile phone operator KPN are among those who have heavily invested in CVM. An increasing number of articles in top marketing journals have also focused on CVM, driven by the availability of large databases with individual-level customer data observable over time. Drawing on research in marketing modeling, marketing strategy, relationship marketing, database marketing, and sales management, researchers have embraced CVM as a distinct and fruitful research domain. Moreover, firms look to academic research for answers to questions such as: • Does CVM create a sustainable competitive advantage and stronger financial performance? • How can firms predict churn? • Which factors are driving the value of customers? • How should firms allocate marketing budgets across customers? • Should firms encourage multichannel behavior? • How does the growing presence of social media and customer communities affect customer management? In the pages that follow, we provide an overview of findings from the extant literature on CVM, discuss key lessons from this literature, and offer our vision of the next developments within CVM. It is our hope that this discussion will begin to answer these questions, and offer managers a new framework for optimizing customer value. Peter C. Verhoef Katherine N. Lemon University of Groningen Boston College 3 MARKETING SCIENCE I N S TITUTE Parts of this paper are based on existing work of the two authors: van Doorn, Jenny, Katherine N. Lemon, Vikas Mittal, Stephan Nass, Doreén Pick, Peter Pirner, and Peter C. Verhoef (2010), “Customer Engagement Behavior: Theoretical Foundations and Research Directions.” Journal of Service Research 13 (3), 253–66. Verhoef, Peter C., and Katherine Lemon (2012), “Advances in Customer Value Management.” In Handbook of Research in Relationship Management, eds. Robert M. Morgan, Janet Turner Parish, and George Deitz. Cheltenham, Mass.: Edgar Elgar Publishing, forthcoming. Verhoef, Peter C., Katherine N. Lemon, A. Parasuraman, Anne Roggeveen, Michael Tsiros, and Leonard A. Schlesinger (2009), ”Customer Experience Creation: Determinants, Dynamics and Management Strategies.” Journal of Retailing 85 (1), 31–41. 4 f a s t forward CUST O M E R V A L U E M A N A GEMENT Customer Value Management Process nderstanding and optimizing the value of As the figure below shows, in the CVM process, a firm’s customer base is the core goal customer strategies—including acquisition activities, of CVM. Companies can increase the marketing campaigns, customer service plans, and value of their customer base in a number multichannel management—flow from data analy- Uof ways: by attracting new customers, increasing sis. Ideally, these strategies