Article: Measuring and Managing Customer Profitability

Author: Gary Cokins

Publication: Strategic Finance, 2015

Executive Summary:

As companies shift from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric focus, a myth that almost all current customers are profitable needs to be replaced with the truth. Some high demanding customers may indeed be unprofitable! Unfortunately, many companies’ managerial accounting systems aren’t able to report customer profitability information to support analysis for how to rationalize which types of customers to retain, grow, or win back and which types of new customers to acquire. With this shift in attention from products to customers, managers are increasingly seeking granular nonproduct-associated costs to serve customer related information as well as information about intangibles, such as customer loyalty and social media messaging about their company and its competitors. Today in many companies there’s a wide gap between the CFO’s function and the marketing and sales function. That gap needs to be closed!

Activity-based costing (ABC) is the method that will economically and accurately trace the consumption of an organization’s resource expenses (e.g., salaries, supplies) to products and to the types and kinds of channels and customer segments that place varying degrees of workload demand on the company. It should no longer be acceptable not to have a rational system of assigning so-called nontraceable costs to their sources of origin. ABC is that system. Yet many companies still don’t use it.

Continue reading…

Link to full article: https://www.bpmpartners.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Cokins-IMA-Customer-Profitability-February-2015.pdf