Question

A businessman asks you to produce a profitability profile of his customers. Once you have provided it, he remarks: "So I should drop all those customers where the costs of servicing the customer exceed the revenue from that customer?" Answer him and explain

Answer 1

Solution:-

Although CP is nothing more than the result of applying the business concept of profit to a customer relationship, measuring the profitability of a firm’s customers or customer groups can often deliver useful business insights.

The purpose of the “customer profit” metric is to identify the profitability of individual customers. Companies commonly look at their performance in aggregate. A common phrase within a company is something like: “We had a good year, and the business units delivered $400,000 in profits.” When customers are considered, it is often using an average such as “We made a profit of $2.50 a customer.” Although these can be useful metrics, they sometimes disguise an important fact that not all customers are equal and, worse yet, some are unprofitable. Simply put, rather than measuring the “average customer,” we can learn a lot by finding out what each customer contributes to our bottom line.^[1][2]

Quite often a very small percentage of the firm’s best customers will account for a large portion of firm profit. Although this is a natural consequence of variability in profitability across customers, firms benefit from knowing exactly who the best customers are and how much they contribute to firm profit.

At the other end of the distribution, firms sometimes find that their worst customers actually cost more to serve than the revenue they deliver. These unprofitable customers actually detract from overall firm profitability. The firm would be better off if they had never acquired these customers in the first place.