Re: [projectvrm] On "How Valuable Are Your Customers"

[Britt Blaser < >]

Similar disconnects in health care. My wife Tamara has created 2 
multi-disciplinary Women's Health Care centers. Women make almost all health 
care decisions so, if they are treated well at a hospital, their family's - 
and friends' - business will follow.

But that's a connection that hospital administrators can't perceive, so they 
miss the opportunities. 

On Jul 16, 2014, at 11:38 PM, Doc Searls 
<
 >
 wrote:

> That's the title of an HBR piece 
> <http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/07/how-valuable-are-your-customers/> that begins 
> this way:
> 
>> Not all customers are created equal. If you’ve ever run a business (or 
>> even just been a customer yourself), then you know that some customers 
>> provide more revenue (and incur fewer costs) than others. Figuring out 
>> which to focus on and invest in is critical if you want to maximize your 
>> profit.
>> 
>> Many companies use a calculation called customer lifetime value (CLV) to 
>> determine how much a customer is worth in comparison with others. Even if 
>> you don’t have to calculate CLV yourself (there are lots of tools that 
>> will do the math for you), it’s important to understand the concept so you 
>> can decide whether to use it when making marketing and sales decisions.
>> 
>> So what exactly is CLV? Here’s a basic definition: The amount of profit 
>> your company can expect to generate from a customer, for the time the 
>> person (or company) remains a customer (e.g., x number of years). At its 
>> core, CLV is the present value of all future streams of profits that an 
>> individual customer generates over the life of his or her business with 
>> the firm.
> 
> 
> Some CLV is calculable, obviously. And some of those calculations are well 
> known to us. Being a million+ mile flyer with United makes me worth a lot 
> to them, and them to me. (Let's leave the coercion issue — a big one — 
> aside for now.)
> 
> But what about the stuff not measured with money alone? What about the 
> externalities of genuine loyalty? I figure I've spent about $2500, total, 
> on Canon cameras and lenses, and another $1500 or so on rentals. But I've 
> probably contributed to sales of Canon goods many times those amounts. And 
> nearly all the shots I put up on Flickr 
> <https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/>, which get seen about 15,000 
> times per day on average, were shot with Canon gear — information featured 
> prominently with each shot.
> 
> What would be a better metric, from the customer-side — the VRM — 
> perspective?
> 
> Doc