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Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value From Your Scarcest Resource
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Sales rank 460,600
Customers rating (based on 13 reviews)
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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
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| Publisher | Broadway Business | | Release date | 06/2005 | | Availability | Usually ships in 24 hours | | Edition | Hardcover |
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 Moving mountains isn't easy
Thirteen years ago, Peppers and Rogers' "The One to One Future" moved customer status from that of corporate pawn to valuable partner. Ensuing books - theirs and others - refined and facilitated that strategy.
Now "Return on Customer" justifies the customer a seat and powerful vote on the board. It provides principles, compelling logic and financial rationale that management, analysts and investors can utilize, develop and apply within their corporation. Moving mountains isn't easy, "Return on Customer" goes a long way to fuel that shift.
 Poorly written, lack of substance, over-stretched on one single term and impractical
Except the very equation of ROC which is a natural extension of ROI, and chapter 12 on data privacy issue that are quite unique in themselves, it is by far the worst book of its kind I had read within the last 30 days, amongst them "Technology and Customer Service" by Paul Timm, "Customer Share Marketing" by Tom Osenton, "The Dollarization Discipline" by Jeffery Fox, "Loyalty Rules" by Frederick Reichheld and "The Customer Loyalty Solution" by Arthur Hughes. I quoted those names not to boast anything, but to express my strong disappointment and frustration against this book or the authors, that I really feel being cheated of my valuable time and price of the book. I sincerely recommend you to look for something much better, which is so easy to find, if you truly want to learn CRM.
Disappointing
This shall be an interesting short article not a book. Too much padding. Any high school grad can easily summarize it in a one single A4 page. Disappointing since written by serious people.
Managing Your Customers as Investments, an Amazon book by GUPTA and LEHMAN is uncomparably better.
Peppers and Rogers Deliver A Fresh Perspective on Customer Value
There's so much written out there about customer loyalty, and so much of it is the same song n' dance. Fact is, so few of the loyalty gurus go to the place of bridging the vision and the tactics. Don and Martha have taken the tried-and-true tenets of customer value and customer loyalty and wrapped some measures around them so that executives, shareholders, and board members can begin understanding--and measuring--the value of their customer assets.
As with their other works, the authors offer a mixture of new ideas and real-world examples to bring their concepts home. The complexity of the work and thought required to understand not only customer interactions and behaviors, but there intentions, is explained via a clear and powerful framework that transcends marketing and advertising, and goes straight to the bottom line. I appreciated the book's organization, and the comprehensive end-notes were a nice annotation and background to the authors' thought processes and research.
Another successful work by two pioneers who will continue to propel customer focus forward!
 Return on Customer -- An important concept
There is a wide-spread school of thought that believes business decisions should be evaluated on their long-term impact. Yet too many decisions are actually driven by short-term results like revenue targets or quarterly earnings. Despite knowing better, it seems that short-term metrics always outweigh long-term benefits in business decisions - sometimes to the detriment of the business (as in cases like Enron).
Don and Martha's book make an important contribution to the business world by raising the awareness of too much short-sighted decision making and their potentially negative consequences. The core idea of looking at "Return on Customer" (ROC) is compelling and easy to understand.
Many related ideas and concepts have been developed over the last 20 years - including customer life-time value, the loyalty effect, etc. - yet the practical applications of these ideas in the day-to-day business world are limited. The ROC book takes many of these ideas and integrates them into a single framework, bringing us one step closer to having a simple, widely accepted approach for putting all of these ideas into practice. If nothing else, it offers one solution and challenges us to continue to work on developing the tools and methodologies that can be put into practice to balance short-term and long-term consequences of our business decisions today.
"Return on Customer" is a very readable book. It provides a compelling case for seeking ways to integrate a "life-time" perspective into how we evaluate business decisions and the managers that make those decisions. It offers many examples - yes, some of them may be redundant or less relevant to some readers - but they make the ideas more than a mere theoretical construct. ROC is not rocket science, but then again, how many of us would seriously contemplate ROC if it were rocket science. Instead, let's hope that the book appeals to a broad group of normal business people - stock analysts and business executives alike - and that it motivates us to continue to refine the tools and seek ways to put into practice processes and metrics that will drive better decision making for the long-term.
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