Customer Value Management
The Business Need
Business fads, and strategies and trends come and go in importance in the popular media and in the minds of harried, frazzled managers. Opportunities and challenges follow their own particular roller coaster pattern of emergence and decline. Rapid fire solutions such as going on-shore, off-shore, or near shore, out-sourcing, in-sourcing or rightsizing or downsizing all have their moments of prominence. But in this turbulent environment only one thing remains constant; the business of business is about getting, holding and growing profitable customers.
But not all customers are equally profitable. At one end of the scale a small percentage of customers are generating wild profit margins while and at the other end a much larger proportion are actually haemorrhaging profit out of the firm at an alarming rate. Finding out which customer falls into which category and doing something permanent about it is the overriding business challenge.
The Solution
Get to know your customers a whole lot better and in a structured way that enables you to understand their true value to the firm and what they want from the firm and divide them into categories (segments) accordingly. Acclimatise your firm to get much closer to the more profitable and growable groups of customers while understanding that by the same principle customers which will never be profitable to the firm must be released - to take their unprofitable business to your competitors!. Holding those profitable and growable customers close to the firm while serving an increasing proportion of their needs is ultimately what your business is about.
Our Approach
Fullstream's IDENT methodology enables the organisation to approach the challenge of developing profitable customer strategies in a systematic step-wise manner which will realise major business benefits.
Identify
gather, analyse and collate your basic customer information in such a way that it enables the firm to identify each customer uniquely and in such a manner that you can communicate with them or deliver your firms products and services to them.
Differentiate
Segment all customers in terms of their value (net of costs) to the firm, growth potential and their needs from the firm.
Engage
Talk with you most valuable customers in an integrated manner, entertaining their requirements and remembering their preferences.
Tailor
The products and services (solutions) of the firm more specifically to the needs of each customer group. Consider how to meet the customer's needs with a Better, Cheaper or Faster solution.
The Benefits
Somebody once said that trying to unravel the complexity of a customer's relationship with the firm is about as easy as unpicking a plate of cold spaghetti. The IDENT™ methodology goes a long way to do just that for our clients:
- Provides a step-wise blueprint to realise highly profitable customer strategies.
- Ensures that customer insight is systematically harvested across the organisation and actionable activities set in motion.
- Supports the necessary management of the changes which must happen across an organisation if they are to successfully adopt these strategies.
- Provides management with the quantifiable rationale to undertake painful, almost counterintuitive actions (such as firing customers - the chronically unprofitable ones!)
Our Experience
The primary purpose the Fullstream consulting operation is to enable leading firms to do better business with their customers. Not surprisingly most consulting engagements with our clients involve a very significant component of Customer strategy implementation.
- Assisted a leading UK Software publishing firm to grow customer profitability by 34% in 2004 in an otherwise static market.
- Assisted an Irish distributor of personal health care products to steer through tough times and prosper by implementing a customer-centric approach to business.
Contact Us
To learn more about how our Customer Value Management experience could benefit your next major business change initiative contact ria.wiid@fullstream.ie or call her on +353 85 158 3705