Comprehensive Report-CRM CLV
Comprehensive Report-CRM CLV
Comprehensive Report-CRM CLV
De Leon
SR Code: 19-52460
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) a marketing metric that projects the value of a
customer over the entire history of that customer's relationship with a company. It is the
current value of the likely future income flow generated by an individual purchaser. It is
variously referred to as lifetime customer value or just lifetime value, and abbreviated
CLV, LCV, or LTV).
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) determines the value of a customer to the firm over
the life cycle of the customer. It seeks to maximize profit by analyzing customer
behavior and business cycles to identify and target customers with the greatest potential
net value over time. A Profitable customer is one that overtime yields a revenue system
that exceeds by an acceptable amount of the company's cost stream of attracting,
selling and servicing that customer over time.
These have however resulted in tough competition and the high rate of brand switch
among consumers. Quality and effective service leads to satisfied customers and helps
in developing loyalty. Commitment to innovation and customer oriented business
decision-making is the order of the day with the focus on
Relationship marketing is about customer value and value chain. Customers define
the business and their relationships are the key strategic assets of the organization.
Quality and service act as the customer retention tools. The need to be in constant
contact with the customer is a key principle of Relationship marketing. Consumer credit
cards, Frequent Flyer programme, discount coupons by shops are all used to reward
customers for frequent and loyal purchasing behavior. Further each transaction is now
entered into a database.
Customer Lifetime Value is one of the major focus areas for companies because the
cost of acquisition of new customers is much higher than the cost of retention of existing
customers.
It allows companies to know exactly how much each customer is worth in monetary
terms, and therefore exactly how much a marketing department should be willing to
spend to acquire each customer. It is a concept adopted from direct marketing which
looks on the long term customer behavior as the key for success.
It is more profitable to have a set of regular long-term loyal and profitable customers
than to have more number of customers. The 20:80 rule of marketing is that 20 % of the
customers’ account for 80% of the company's profits and it is much cheaper to retain a
consumer than to attract a new one. To reach these customers and convert them into
partners is the real challenge.
Loyal customers become more valuable over time. They are different from other
customers as they tend to:
A Profitable customer is one that overtime yields a revenue system that exceeds by
an acceptable amount of the company's cost stream of attracting, selling and servicing
that customer over time.
Building a relationship with customers only works when the customer benefits from the
relationship. This can happen when you provide to customers something that they will
appreciate and value, but at the same time do not cost you too much. One must try
therefore building a relationship with customers whose behavior can be modified, to
convert them over time into long run loyal and profitable customers.
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the value of the customer over the Lifecycle and is
a multi-period calculation, usually stretching 3 to 7 years into the future.
Following steps can be used for calculating the CLV in a simple manner:
1. Calculate the average sale "S" by dividing the total amount of sale by number of
sales transaction for the period (usually one year.
2. Calculate the number of times an average customer buys " T" from the company by
diving the total number of sales transactions by the total number of customers.
3. Find out the number of years "Y" an average customer buys from the firm.
4. Find out the number of people " R " referred by the an average customer- this is
usually between 3 to 12
5. Find out the percentage of such referrals "C" who become customers-this is usually
between 20 to 70%
The Lifetime Value of a customer is the net profit the customer generates over their
Lifecycle and is used to make decisions about allocating marketing to ideas that
generate high potential value customers, and away from ideas generating low potential
value customers.
Repeat behavior indicates higher Lifetime Value, and predicts future repeat behavior,
regardless of what the actual monetary Lifetime Value is.
The Customer Lifetime Value numbers are really very powerful measures as it include
in a single set of numbers based on the
Customer lifetime value calculations are usually calculated based on certain data inputs
like
Lifetime Value is the value of the customer over the Life Cycle The most difficult part of
calculating lifetime value is deciding what a “lifetime” is. Lifetime Value doesn't exist
without a Life Cycle. Customer Life Cycle is simply the behavior of a customer with your
company over time.
Customers begin a relationship with you, and over time, either decide to continue this
relationship, or end it. At any point in this Life Cycle, the customer is either becoming
more or less likely to continue doing business with you, and demonstrates this likelihood
through their interactions with you.
If you can predict where customers are in the Life Cycle, you can maximize your
marketing ROI by targeting customers most likely to buy, trying to “save” customers who
have declining interest, and not wasting money on customers unlikely to continue doing
business with you.
Customers who are the cheapest to acquire may have the shortest Life Cycles, and
customers who are expensive to acquire might have very long Life Cycles. Customers
who purchased recently were more likely to buy again versus customers who had not
purchased in a while.
Customers who purchased frequently were more likely to buy again versus customers
who had made just one or two purchases. Customers who had spent the most money in
total were more likely to buy again. The most valuable customers tended to continue to
become even more valuable.
To retain and increase the value of customers, you have to engage them by
communicating on a regular basis. If you don't, customers will be less loyal and either
abandon you for a competitor who communicates with them, or will spend less with you
over time. Marketing promotions are essential to any kind of customer retention effort;
promotions drive the sales activity of customers.
By definition a customer who is more likely to respond has a higher future value than a
customer less likely to respond. The three key components to maximizing profits in
customer marketing are:
1. Structuring offers to get the most profitable mix of response rate and cost of
the offer.
2. Creating an "early warning system" to flag customers who are likely to leave
so by tracking customer behavior, so they can be targeted for special
promotions.
You can organize your business around customer value, if you can compare the future
value of customers. Life Time value is used to make decisions about allocating
marketing to ideas that generate high potential value customers, and away from ideas
generating low potential value customers. Merchants typically use promotional offers,
trial periods, unique content, bundled offerings and more to attract potential consumers.
Determine which parts of the site or activities attract high value customers and focus on
them to increase customer loyalty and profitability.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT MODEL (CRM)
CRM is the strategic process of selecting customers that a firm can most profitably
serve and shaping interactions between a company and these customers. The ultimate
goal is to optimize the current and future value of customers for the company.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a broadly recognized, widely-
implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a Company’s interactions with
customers, clients and sales prospects. It involves using technology to organize,
automate, and synchronize business processes, principally sales activities, but also
those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. An important part of CRM
is identifying the different types of customers and then developing specific strategies for
interacting with each one. Examples of such strategies include developing better
relationships with profitable customers, locating and enticing new customers who will be
profitable, and finding appropriate strategies for unprofitable customers, which could
mean terminating those relationships that cause a company to lose money.
2. Customer-facing front-end level: This type of CRM focuses on the total customer
experience. The goal is to build a single view of the customer across all contact
channels and to distribute customer intelligence to all customer-facing functions.
3. Strategic level: This perspective tries to free the term CRM from any technology
underpinnings and from specific customer management techniques. It describes CRM
as a process to implement customer centricity in the market and build shareholder
value. Here, knowledge about customers and their preferences has implications for the
entire organization, such as for R&D or supply chain management.
Evolution of CRM
Innovations in CRM during the 1990s matched those of ERP, including the
integration of different independent subsystems into one package. CRM
technology was expected to fill the gaps left by ERP functionality and address the
business needs of the company’s customer-facing front end. The goal was to
create a single view of all interactions with customers, independent of the
purpose of that contact (e.g., pre-sales, sales transaction, post-sales service) or
its means (e.g., telephone, e-mail, Internet). For the most part, this goal was not
achieved during the 1990s, leading to increasing disillusionment with CRM
technology and implementations. Customer expectations in this period far
exceeded the realized benefits of CRM technology.
By the end of 2002, the CRM market had started to pick up, and the gap between
customers’ perceived value and value realized was closing. Organizations
learned from experience and their failure to implement prior versions of
CRM. The best organizations began to focus on integrating customer-facing
front-end systems with back-end systems, as well as with the systems used by
partners and suppliers.
The debate on RM started in 1950s and prior to that the focus was on massive
production and selling, therefore it was called transaction marketing with a focus on
short term benefits and relationships and with emphasis on services and relationships.
Due to this short-term orientation; marketing had been seriously criticized and later on
this provided foundation to RM. Sheth (2000) finds CRM roots in RM, and Ryals and
Knox (2001) claim its foundation in RM and marketing.
CRM models are helpful to understand the concept of CRM and regulate the modern
concept of CRM.
Table 2
Contemporary CRM Models
Model Author & Year
The QCI model is a product of a consultancy firm. The model’s authors prefer to
describe their model as a customer management model, omitting the word ‘relationship’.
At the heart of the model, they depict a series of activities that companies need to
perform in order to acquire and retain customers.
The model features people performing processes and using technology to assist in
those activities.
Figure. 3 QCI Model
This model includes the series of activities related to employees, people, and
organization, and technology as well.
According to this model, relationships process with the external environment. Because
when a customer wants to start selling process or wants to interact with the
organization, external environment directly affects the customer experience. External
environment also affects the planning process of the organizations.
Now as you can see in the figure that customer experience affects three activities
future: customer proposition, customer management activity, and measurement.
People and organization have relation with the planning process, customer proposition,
customer management activity and measurement. Because CRM starts with people and
ends with people.
Although the model is appropriate for storing massive information regarding customers
and organization and at the same time provides the required information whenever it is
needed to solve the problems or making business decisions. But it is not appropriate for
strategic marketing decision making, because the decision is taken on the basis of
analysis of data that restricts it to CRM analytics. It is dominated by IT. Technological
components have been used in codifying, storing, retrieving and disseminating the
knowledge such as XML and intelligent agents (human replacement, which interprets
the information). Furthermore, the researchers themselves admit that the model cannot
capture all types of knowledge and knowledge repositories are not consistent with the
business process, because repository cannot replace human beings.
3. IDIC Model
The IDIC model was developed by Peppers and Rogers. This model suggests that
companies should take four actions in order to the building, keeping and retaining
the long-term one-to-one relationships with customers.
Identify
Differentiate (value, need)
Interaction
Customize
Figure 5. IDIC Model (Peppers and Roger, 2004)
Identify. First, a company must identify who is an actual customer and should know
about deep knowledge of their customers.
It is not only necessary to know about your customers but you have to know about more
and more your customers so that you can easily understand them and serve them
profitably.
Value: Differentiate your customer to identify which customer is generating most value
now and which offer most for the future. Give more value to those customers who are
generating more value for you.
Need: Differentiate your customers according to their needs. Different customers have
different need and serving the in profitable ways need more knowledge about their
needs.
Interaction
The company must emphasis on interaction with the customer to ensure that you
understand customer’s expectations and their relationship with a brand. The company
must consider Interaction with customers according to their needs and value that they
are providing you. Interaction directly with customers makes believe that company has a
concern with them and company wants to serve them individually. These efforts make
customers loyal and help the company to build long-term relationships.
Customize
When you differentiate your customers according to their values and needs, after that,
you have to customize your product according to their needs and values.
Customize the offer and communications to ensure that the expectations of customers
are met. Interact to customize is information to customers about your ability to cope with
their need.
Failure in the third step means something wrong with second or third steps. So return or
go back to previous steps study them again and search out more and more and
rearrange these steps.
The captioned model (Figure 6) is given by Buttle (2004) which is useful for
developing and implementing the CRM strategies. The ultimate purpose of this
model is to build a strong relationship with strategically profitable customers (but not
a strong profitable relationship irrespective of any customers). The model
encompasses five primary stages with four supporting conditions.
The primary stages ensure that a company analyzes the customer portfolio to
identify the target customer and builds a customer database. That database makes
information accessible for decisions and analysis of the customer behaviors and
attitudes. It also builds a strong relationship network of suppliers, employees,
customers which helps to understand the requirements of the chosen customers.
That network brings value proposition to customers and company through
continuously creating and delivering value. The network enhances the customer life
time value by motivating customers to purchase repeatedly which results in retaining
and acquiring profitable customers.
CRM, the meaning of those three letters, is emotionally contested. For some, CRM
is simply a bridge between marketing and IT: CRM is, therefore, an IT-enabled sales
and service function. For others, it’s little more than precisely targeted 1- to-1
communications.
Simply we can say, CRM Is a tool to manage customer relationships with the help of
people, information technology, customer’s data, company’s process and customers
themselves.
Figure 6. CRM Value Chain (Buttle,2004)
The CRM value chain is an established model which businesses can easily follow when
they developing and implementing their CRM strategies. It has been five years in
development and has been piloted in a number of business-to-business and business-
to-consumer settings, with both large companies and SMEs: IT, software, telecoms,
financial services, retail, media, manufacturing, and construction.
The model is based on strong theoretical principles and the practical requirements of
business. The ultimate purpose of the CRM value chain process is to ensure that the
company builds long-term mutually-valued relationships with its strategically significant
customers. Not all customers are strategically significant. Indeed some customers are
simply too expensive to acquire and service. They buy little and infrequently; they pay
late or default; they make extraordinary demands on customer service and sales
resources; they demand expensive, short-run, customized output; and then they defect
to competitors. These are called strategically-insignificant customers.
Five primary steps to profitable relationships
The five steps in the CRM value chain are customer portfolio analysis, customer
intimacy, network development, value proposition development and managing the
relationship.
A customer portfolio comprises the mixture of groups that make up the customer base
of a business. For example, Coca-Cola’s customer portfolio consists of restaurants,
grocery stores, amusement parks and sports arenas.
It means before starting the CRM process, an organization should know about their
customers thoroughly.
Customer Intimacy
Selecting customers to serve with your product is one thing and knowing your customer
is another thing. Most companies collect customer data.
Some industries are overwhelmed with information – scanner data, loyalty card data,
complaints files, market research, and geo-demographic data. Now the question is how
you will use this data in order to serve best ways to your customers. Long-term
relationships require more knowledge about you customers.
Knowing about what, who, why, when and how of customer behavior is most important
for a company to manage long-term relationships with loyal and strategically
insignificant customers.
A company’s network position i.e. its connectedness to other parties who co-operate in
delivering value to the chosen customer is a source of great competitive advantage. In
order to serve customer’s relationships, it is important for a company to create value for
a customer on every stage of the selling process. It means the company must create a
complete network for customers to serve profitably. A good network may contain
suppliers, manufacturers, employees, investors, technology, distributors, and retailers.
CRM is not a quick fix; it requires owners and investors who will commit to the long-term
investment in the people, processes, and technology to implement CRM strategies.
By the fourth step of the CRM value chain, you will know who you want to serve and will
have built, or be in the process of building, the network. Now the network has to work
together to create and deliver the chosen value(s) to the selected customers.
Network develop by the company now will create a value proposition. Every member in
a developed network works together as a whole to creating value for customers.
This is the final step of primary stages. All previous steps help the company to create
the relationship and start the relationship. Now, this depends on company how a
company manages these relationships so that parties, company, and customer, get
value for the long term.
Five supporting conditions of CRM value chain model. These are five supporting
conditions to fulfill the CRM value chain model.
These are some basic conditions that a company even must consider while managing
the CRM. Company’s culture defines that whether you will manage long term
relationship or not because sometimes your culture doesn’t allow you to do such
activities. Company procurement process and HR process also suggest that how you
will do such activity.
Without IT and Data management process you cannot do CRM because customer’s
information and data related to customers save on technology.
This is really a comprehensive and too generic model, encompasses almost all types of
CRM. The first two processes deal strategic CRM, the multichannel integration process
represents operational CRM, and information management process enlightens upon the
scope of analytical CRM.
The strategy development process and value creation process have been considered
very important processes that support in strategy development and help in making
strategic decisions. The customer knowledge is channelized and gathered through
sales force (employees) of an organization, as indicated in this model, which is the most
important contribution of the model. But it cannot get the desired result because the
technology has been given the role of analyzing and interpreting the information.
The model is too generic in nature to practice. The system, conceived in the model,
integrates customers, employees, organization, processes and technology. It
summarizes the research elements for successful CRM implementation. The most
important is the involvement of employees in analyzing the situation, formulating the
strategy and taking actions to improve the relationship with customers. The model is
lacking in integrating knowledge because a database is being used for incorporating the
information in system.
This empirical model is based on survey of 500 organizations throughout the United
States. There were 160 out of 500 questionnaires usable for this study. The result
revealed that 94% of the respondents view CRM as a strategic enabler and the role of
IT as a tool to enhance the strategic direction efficiently. The study also found that
increase in the integration of activities such as functional areas, information sharing,
cooperation and collaboration throughout the organization contributes to the CRM
success. However, this model lacks in dealing with knowledge. But it provides a good
insight which allows companies to improve the quality and productivity with reducing
cost due to improved communication among employees and customers.
Given model (Figure 11) has investigated the relationship among CRM practices,
innovation capability and organizational performance of Iranian manufacturing firms.
Result revealed a significant and positive relationship of CRM practices on innovation
capability and organization performance. Innovation capabilities also have a significant
and positive impact on organization performance
Structure equation modeling test is used to validate the data collected from 211 firms.
Finding of this research has revealed CRM as a strategy to improve innovation
capability and enhance firm’s competitive advantage. No mechanism has been
suggested in this model to process the information other than IT. Foss and his
colleagues argue that IT enabled business strategy has not been considered truly
positive (Foss et al., 2006) and any competitive advantage that brings by IT is easily be
imitable (Davenport and Prusak, 1998)..