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

Don Peppers (Author), Martha Rogers (Author)
3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)


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Book Description

June 21, 2005
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


Editorial Reviews

Review

“Finally – a business metric that can drive better management and higher stock price. I predict soon you’ll be hard pressed to find a company that isn’t tracking ROC.”
—Larry Kudlow, co-host of CNBC’s “Kudlow & Cramer”

“Books like this come only once a decade – a conceptual breakthrough that makes instant sense, combined with the toolkit to apply it well. Stunning insight.”
—Scott Cook, founder of Intuit

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.


Product Details

  • Hardcover: 304 pages
  • Publisher: Crown Business (June 21, 2005)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0385510306
  • ISBN-13: 978-0385510301
  • Product Dimensions: 6.3 x 1 x 9.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #967,041 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

13 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.6 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars What all the big companies are missing, June 30, 2005
This review is from: Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value From Your Scarcest Resource (Hardcover)
ROC - What a concept! I worked for a leading (#2) electronics retailer for more years than I care to discuss. As a corporate employee, I saw mistake after mistake but it wasn't until I read Return on Customer that it all became obvious what was going wrong. The company was focused on short term gains to please the stockholders rather than cultivating customers.

All business decision-makers need to read this book! Peppers clearly articulates what is wrong with many of today's companies and he shows how business people can focus on their customers to increase shareholder wealth.

Peppers describes how telemarketing efforts (something consumers unilaterally hate) may look like they increase current sales; and therefore, produce a hefty ROI. What businesses do not see is that these campaigns actually lose customers for them over the long run, thus decreasing shareholder value.

As you read this book, you can easily recognize the companies you deal with that are customer-focused and those that are not. You may think the concept is obvious - but then why isn't everyone doing it? By measuring Return On Customer, you create loyal customers who then evangelize your company - the best kind of marketing!

Corporate execs and business owners, you need to read this book!
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Great for all companies - large and small, July 6, 2005
By 
L. Frembes (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value From Your Scarcest Resource (Hardcover)
I am self-employed and wasn't sure if ROC would help me at all. I've just started reading it and I already have begun to formulate which changes to make in my business strategy to help build lifelong relationships with my clients. What an excellent book from two very knowledgeable sources.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Return on Customer -- An important concept, November 22, 2005
This review is from: Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value From Your Scarcest Resource (Hardcover)
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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Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
Businesses succeed by getting, keeping, and growing customers. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
total customer equity, treating different customers, maximizing your return, valuing customers, customer lifetime values, creating more value, customer insight, most valuable customers, total shareholder return, transactional records, customer portfolio, employee culture, segment management
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Wall Street, Inland Revenue, Best Buy, United States, New York, Executive Club, One Boise, Royal Bank of Canada, British Airways, Magna Steyr, Southwest Airlines, Boise Office Solutions, Goldfish Principle, Journal of Marketing, Pitney Bowes, Balanced Scorecard, Business Week, Cisco Systems, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, General Motors, George Bank, Golden Rule, Harvard Business Review, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Most Growable Customers
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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