Customer Reviews

Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value From Your Scarcest Resource

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

In an age of deteriorating customer service, it's refreshing to see Peppers and Rogers confront the long term affects of how a business treats its customers. So many businesses seem to forget that eventually they WILL run out of customers. They treat them poorly for years, then sit around scratching their heads wondering why they've lost market share. I highly recommend this book to anyone who deals with customers, and for every business owner, executive, and manager out there.

Can be a bit dry and gets into quite a bit of detailed analysis that may turn some readers off, but overall, the information is timely, accurate, and presented well.

At some point during the book, its repetitiveness will help you realize that there isn't much point in reading further. (I made it through Chapter 5 of 14.)

Page 7 exposes the ROC calculation as an ROI calculation with an estimate of the customer equity (CE) in place of a net benefit of an investment opportunity. The book falls drastically short of showing you how to actually develop a consistent and accurate CE, which is effectivley the customer's lifetime value (LTV).
To get to an LTV or CE for one customer or a set of customers, one has to continue to rely on the inexact art of forecasting and potential. The ROC amounts to another business equation that manipulates guesstimates, forecasts, and sales intuition into a calculation that hopefully can be used to convince financial people in an organization that customer focus is a necessary part of business.

There's no arguing the importance of a customer-centric approach to business. There's also no arguing the need to develop a metric to combat short-term, bottom-line thinking while building a case for long term survival. For hammering home these points over and over and over and over, one has to concede at least two stars. However, there isn't enough material here to justify a book, and since the ROC is a repackaged ROI, I recommend you take a pass.

Don Peppers and Martha Rogers have done it again! This is their best book yet, following a string of six best sellers.

If you're a fan of Peppers and Rogers - like me - Return on Customer is the book for you. It's the first of their strategic publications which brings the concepts of customer-centric relationship management into firm alignment with the priorities of executives charged with the long-term valuation and economic survival of a business enterprise.

Here's why Return on Customer is important: It describes...

[] Managing to short-term results is damaging

[] Public firms are whipsawed by Wall Street and have admitted they would give up economic value in exchange for meeting short-term, "Wall Street" expectations

[] An obsession with current earnings at many firms has created a culture of bad management. Executive scandals and questionable accounting are only the most noteworthy symptoms - far more insidious is the corrosive effect this obsession has on management decision making

[] Customers are your scarcest resource

[] Without customers, you don't have a business. You have a hobby

[] Products and services are in over-supply. The only thing in short supply these days? Customers. Customers are difficult to find and hard to keep. In today's business world, customers are even scarcer than capital. Customers are the scarce resource

Return on Customer (ROC) 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.

Do yourself, your shareholders and your customers a favor - read this book - it ROCs!!!!

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.

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!

The authors make a strong case for balancing the impact of day to day business decisions on current cash flows from customers against future possible cash flows from a customer. They even provide some insights into how a business owner/manager could improve the balance of his/her decisions.
Unfortunately, their writing style is filled with repetitive consultant speak. Each chapter begins with two or three paragraphs of the same message. The authors then reiterate the message with pointless rhetorical questions throughout. Readers will need to cull through this jargon to find the truly useful material.

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.