Tietointensiivisiä palveluita tarjoavan yrityksen asiakaskannattavuusanalyysi

Tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli selvittää tietointensiivisiä palveluita tarjoavan yrityksen kannattavuuden jakautuminen. Tutkimuksessa selvitetään myös asiakaskannattavuutta selittävät tekijät. Aineistoon kerättiin tiedot 268 asiakkaasta. Tutkimus toteuttiin kvantitatiivisilla menetelmillä. Tutkimuksen hypoteesit laadittiin pääasiallisesti aiempien vastaavien tutkimusten perusteella. Tutkimustulosten perusteella voidaan sanoa, että asiakaskannattavuuden jakautumisessa on vaihtelua. Tulokset osoittivat myös, että suurin osa yrityksen asiakkaista on kannattavia. Asiakaskannattavuutta selittää pääosin asiakkaan koko. Myös asiakassuhteen kestolla ja asiakasryhmällä on vaikutusta asiakaskannattavuuteen.

The key practices of customer portfolio management (CPM) process in the medical and healthcare B2B industry

The goal of this study is to deepen the understanding of the customer portfolio management process. There are many models for the process, and they are not necessarily exclusive of each other. Consequently, the inclusion of many models might even prove out to be beneficial. Other theoretical framework include the current economical situation and its propose on customer portfolio management. With an understanding of the theoretical models as a background, the empirical part of this study compares Finnish multinational medical and healthcare technology companies’ customer portfolio management practices. The empirical research was carried out with theme interviews held with 11 sales and marketing managers or directors from four different companies. The goal was to discover the most essential practices of the process steps in the companies. The result of this study is that there is a lack of systematic customer portfolio management, but most companies are aiming to improve this in the near future. The most essential practices are analysis of sales, communication level, learning, and commitment to strategy of the focal company. Special characteristics of this industry include large business networks that include customers, professional end-users, institutions, universities, researchers, and key opinion leaders. The management and analysis of this comprehensive network has been seen to be extremely important for this industry.

Applying customer value measurement to a customer loyalty program: Case of implementing a key performance indicator based on customer value

In recent decade customer loyalty programs have become very popular and almost every retail chain seems to have one. Through the loyalty programs companies are able to collect information about the customer behavior and to use this information in business and marketing management to guide decision making and resource allocation. The benefits for the loyalty program member are often monetary, which has an effect on the profitability of the loyalty program. Not all the loyalty program members are equally profitable, as some purchase products for the recommended retail price and some buy only discounted products. If the company spends similar amount of resources to all members, it can be seen that the customer margin is lower on the customer who bought only discounted products. It is vital for a company to measure the profitability of their members in order to be able to calculate the customer value. To calculate the customer value several different customer value metrics can be used. During the recent years especially customer lifetime value has received a lot of attention and it is seen to be superior against other customer value metrics. In this master’s thesis the customer lifetime value is implemented on the case company’s customer loyalty program. The data was collected from the customer loyalty program’s database and represents year 2012 on the Finnish market. The data was not complete to fully take advantage of customer lifetime value and as a conclusion it can be stated that a new key performance indicator of customer margin should be acquired in order to profitably drive the business of the customer loyalty program. Through the customer margin the company would be able to compute the customer lifetime value on regular basis enabling efficient resource allocation in marketing.