Business And Leadership, Ireland's Business News Service

“The companies that are much further along with their customer experience maturity are the ones that are enjoying better success during the recession: they’re having much better financial results and they are in fact much more competitive in their industry,” said Rogers, founding partner, Peppers & Rogers Group, and a leading authority on customer-focused relationship management strategies.

She said that customer equity – or the willingness of customers to do business with a company in the future – is the most important measure on which to value a business. The most successful companies of tomorrow will be those that create customer value by anticipating customers’ needs and meeting those needs better than their competitors, she said.

“Businesses can achieve tremendous competitive advantage  by adopting a ‘return on customer’ approach and focusing less on short-term financial measures, which can ultimately lead to the destruction of a company’s long term customer equity base,” she said. 

“All of a company’s revenues come from its customers - the customers it has now and the customers it will have in the future - not its products, brands, stores, employees or campaigns.

"These customers are a company’s scarcest resource, so a company needs to ensure they have effective measures in place to determine the value of their customer base. They need to understand their customers’ actual value today and their potential value in the future in order to know whether their marketing and business activities are creating or destroying customer equity.”

Irish companies must have an accurate understanding of the value they are creating or destroying or they risk making many of the disastrous mistakes that have been observed throughout the current recession, she continued.  “Underlying this must be a commitment to ensuring customer interactions are relevant and customer experiences more tailored and positive. This is even more important in a world of instant, mass communication in which customers talk to each other and share their experiences electronically with millions.

“We also need to understand that some customers are more profitable than others. When this underpins a company’s business model, the firm starts making better decisions about the best use of resources in order to ensure good customers are not subsidising bad customers - after all, why should the best customers pick up the tab for the worst customers?”

Alan Gormley, customer intelligence consultant at SAS Ireland, said the seminar was the start of a collaboration between SAS and Peppers & Rogers in Ireland that will see a number of initiatives during 2010. On 3 and 4 March, the two organisations will provide a two-day, in-depth training course entitled Customer Intelligence Academy designed to show how the ideas discussed in Rogers presentation can be implemented.