What is customer profitability?
Customer profitability is far more than just the gross or net margin generated on a transaction or even customer lifetime value (LTV). Customer profitability is the profit (customer spend – customer cost) across every touch point that customer has with your brand, including customer service contacts, returns, custom fulfillment costs and more.
Running a customer profitability analysis will allow you to see your customer profitability in detail.
Why measuring customer profitability is important
Profitability is every business’s goal. Many factors can influence how attainable and sustainable it is, and the key factor is your customer profitability. Measuring customer profitability is crucially important, and it can be an enlightening exercise.
Once you build the framework to run a customer profitability analysis, it should be easier to refresh annually, or as often as makes sense for your business. The significant value that you gain through this exercise is determining if certain customers are actually costing you money rather than making you money.
In some instances, you may find that the customer group you thought was the most important is actually of lower value to your company than customer segments you haven’t identified yet, which suggests a need for a shift in overall strategy.
If you’re wondering how some customers could be costing you money, it usually comes down to servicing costs. Do you have certain customers who call customer service frequently? Are there certain customers who have special requirements for fulfillment that cost more in labor and fulfillment costs? Or perhaps if you offer customers free shipping and free returns, are there customers who are using that service too much? You’ll start to uncover these segments after you run a customer profitability analysis.
Setting up a customer profitability analysis
Step 1: Define your customer costs
The first step to measuring customer profitability is truly understanding your business expenses and all of the places that a customer might interact with any area of your company. Beyond the actual product or service costs for what they purchase, other costs might include::
- Marketing costs
- Customer service contact costs
- Social media contact costs
- Shipping costs (especially if you fund return shipping)
- Return costs, including restocking or refurbishing
Once you have the list of all the ways customers can interact with your company, you’re ready to move onto Step 2.
Step 2: Define your customer groups
Some businesses have well-defined customer segments that may be based on the size of the business or business unit they buy from. If you don’t have these customer groups easily defined, you can define them now.
For example, based on your business, what types of customers do you have, and why do they buy from you? Even if you don’t have empirical evidence or a big third-party study to define these segments, you know your business and product(s) and can define these segments.
Step 3: Find the Data
Now onto Step 3, where you might have to put on your detective hat: it’s time to search for the details, and you’ll need help from colleagues in the business areas from Step 1.
The first question is,do we have data? You probably do have data, but is it tracked and accessible in an easy way?
It’s unlikely you’ll find every piece of data tied to every single customer—usually things like customer service costs are lumped together as one expense as a line item in Selling, General & Administrative Expense (aka SG&A). But now, you can start putting more science behind it. Here are some ideas to track down more detailed data:
Do you track customer service interactions with the customer? It’s possible you could take a sample of customer service inquiries and determine the customer groups that might over-index in contacting you. The next question is why? The reasons for these costs, be it customer service contacts, returns, or others will come in handy later.
Marketing spend and cost per transaction are other important data points—there could be hidden pearls in this data when you break it down by marketing channel and tie it to specific customer groups.
Ultimately what you’ll end up with, at a minimum, is a series of average costs per activity, such as:
- Marketing cost to generate an order (CPO)
- Average customer service contact per order
- Average cost per customer service contact
- Average return rate
- Average shipping cost
- Etc.
Step 4: Putting it together with a customer profitability analysis example
Let’s say you have 2 customer segments, Segment A and Segment B. A high-level glance at the revenue they drive for your business on each transaction makes Segment B look much more attractive:
Armed with this data alone, you may be tempted to shift your strategy, budgets, and even product development pipeline to cater more to Segment B. After all, they are 25% more valuable than Segment A. Based on these numbers, that would be a solid plan.
But, what if Segment B customers aren’t actually better customers?
Let’s say they have special fulfillment requests that end up costing 25% more in labor and fulfillment fees. And after all of that, they actually return or cancel orders at a significantly higher rate than Segment A customers. Now, they’re not looking like they are quite as good as they did at the start of this example. All of those hidden costs might look something like this:
Yikes! Those Segment B customers are actually costing you a lot of money, not including the cost of the actual product/service. Putting it all together, you would be better off shifting your focus, strategy, and budgets towards Segment A customers for the long-term health and growth of your business.
How to improve customer profitability
Striving to improve customer profitability is an ongoing effort. The first and probably easiest action to take is to maximize your most profitable customer group. What proportion are they of your total business? Could they be bigger, and how? Evaluate the necessary resources, budget, and requirements to grow this customer segment.
That doesn’t mean you should abandon all other customer segments. Just because Segment B in the example above costs more money than Segment A, it doesn’t mean you should never sell to Segment B again. There are likely areas that could improve these metrics.
This comes back to the why. What did you learn in your investigations into these areas that could point to a root cause? Can you add details to the sales process that help guide customers to a product/service that better meets their expectations? Are there policies that could be implemented to prevent some of these costs? Perhaps it’s time to implement automation or SaaS tools to ease the process of buying and selling.
Conclusion
Customer profitability is far more than just the revenue that a customer brings in. Taking the time to evaluate each area of a customer’s journey with your company can reveal insights that have a meaningful
To automate the customer profitability analysis process, learn more about Daasity here, or reach out to us at info@daasity.com.
