What Is Customer Profitability Analysis?

There can be multiple motivations for examining the idea of customer profitability, and it is more complex than just selling a product or service at a loss, or telling a customer goodbye. Before a company decides to say goodbye to a whole segment of customers a customer profitability analysis is a must. This categorization shows there are several different ways companies can serve profitable customers.

In the comparison above, Persona B generates more revenue than Persona A, but Persona A is more profitable. Aggressive – company could renegotiate with these customers their delivery terms / pricing / scope of services , or reconsider internal processes to decrease costs of serving to those customers.

Why Measuring Customer Profitability Is Important

The cost of attracting and retaining the customer must be calculated over the entire lifetime of the customer. Hence, sometimes customer lifetime value gives a more clear picture than CPA. It gives you the entire value a customer would generate in their lifetime rather than the annualized value of a CPA. Nevertheless, the CPA can be a useful tool to re-examine your business strategies and allocate the right resources to serve the right customers.

Once you’ve calculated profitability using the formula above, what can you do with it? Any new strategy or practice needs to be implemented and worked up accordingly. This needs to be reviewed after appropriate periods of time to understand impact on customers. Daasity is the first and only eCommerce analytics company purpose-built for the direct-to-consumer industry that makes business-critical data accessible and usable for strategic decision-making.

Customer Profitability Formulas

Now, you can calculate customer profitability by comparing that figure with the average revenue each persona generates per transaction. Boost your customer retention strategy by tailoring your efforts to each segment. With a profitability analysis, you’ll have a better understanding of the costs involved in building customer loyalty. One of the most common exercises to analyze customers is customer segmentation.

• There might be few flaws in the internal operations of the company that is costing them more to serve the customers.
• Oracle offers Hyperion, OBIEE, and other modules that will do the same.
• Using a tool such as Excel to layout your report makes the most sense as virtually everyone is already conversant with it.
• The main reason for a customer group to generate lower profits is not always the customer.
• Can Customer Service macros or FAQs be created so that the CS team can more quickly and easily address time-consuming requests?

Calculating customer profitability begins by identifying the various costs incurred specifically in relation to servicing a specific customer or segment of customers. Activity Based Costing looks at the various cost drivers to accurately isolate costs and determine a product’s profitability. Firms with large service infrastructure, such as hotels and transportation providers, usually have well developed and defined levels of service available to customers.

Calculating Customer Profitability

Daasity’s mission is to make business-critical data accessible for all DTC brands. With visual analytics, the clarity achieved allows for decisive action that can quickly generate profit improvement. CPA allows companies to evaluate their customers and know how beneficial it is for them to keep the customers. Based on this value they can decide upon the cost of serving them or even to decide whether to continue or let them go.

• Management accounting systems often focus on products, departments, or geographic regions, but not on customers.
• Some customer groups provide profit for a company, and these are the groups that marketers target with advertisements and fantastic deals.
• To minimize the limitation resulting from the fact, that CPA is a backwards-looking tool, a company could additionally consider implementation of Customer Lifetime Value .
• Customer Profitability is essentially a measure of how profitable a specific customer is.
• Learn accounting fundamentals and how to read financial statements with CFI’s free online accounting classes.
• Customer Lifetime Value – All You Need to Know – How to increase Customer Lifetime Value and how do to calculate it?

The main reason for a customer group to generate lower profits is not always the customer. There might be few flaws in the internal operations of the company that is costing them more to serve the customers.

How A Customer Profitability Analysis Makes Your Business More Efficient

The article authors discuss the role of accountants in business analytics and specifically talk about using the recursive partitioning algorithm to analyze customer profitability. Customer profitability is an interesting, valuable metric to consider when structuring your sales, marketing, and service efforts.

Though these formulas can give you a rough overview of your customer profitability, the best way to truly understand the value of your customers is through a customer profitability analysis. Like CLV, it isn’t necessarily predictive of your customers’ behavior. It also only lets you know which customers are generating the most revenue — not the most profit.

Average Revenue Per User Arpu

While firms with small infrastructure such as law firms can tailor their services to better fit individual customers. The companies with large infrastructure will not be able to practically provide custom services to individual customers because the ensuing effect up the distribution chain would become enormous.

Or, 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.

The remainder of this post will be dedicated to a proven and disciplined process of customer profitability analysis. You can perform the below customer profitability analysis on individual customers or combined customer groups (residential vs. commercial, etc.). Optimal allocation of finite resources towards appropriate customer focus can only come from customer knowledge. Therefore, having a deep analytical understanding of relative customer profitability is a critical prerequisite to annual or quarterly strategic thinking. To minimize the limitation resulting from the fact, that CPA is a backwards-looking tool, a company could additionally consider implementation of Customer Lifetime Value .

Once you have a list of all the ways customers can interact with your company, you’re ready to move onto Step 2. Learn accounting fundamentals and how to read financial statements with CFI’s free online accounting classes. There are many vendors that offer data warehouses with an Excel front end that help you Simplify Customer Profitability for Banks. IBM offers Cognos, TM1, and other pieces that will allow you add the Funds Transfer Pricing and Activity Based Costing. Oracle offers Hyperion, OBIEE, and other modules that will do the same. With that, the rich man opened his hand to reveal a twenty-carat diamond.

Customer Characteristics Every Service Rep Should Know

Otherwise, it can look to charge its customers for additional service visits to shift the weight of the cost from the company to the customer. In contrast, Customer Profitability Analysis is a method of looking at the various activities and expenses incurred in servicing a particular customer. In other words, it focuses on analyzing profit per customer rather than profit per product. An over-the-top component to the puzzle would be the use of a Web Portal that puts all the reports in one place that is easy to access for all your end users.

Your business won’t unilaterally appeal to a single group of customers comprised entirely of buyers with identical habits, backgrounds, and budgets. As your business expands, you’ll probably come away with a more diverse base of customers. Carriage trade – company should focus on reducing the cost to serve, investigating cost factors and looking for ways to streamline internal processes. Ultimately you can use these figures to develop new strategies to increase customer loyalty and retention rates, while creating higher-value relationships.

Start by determining all the different touchpoints your customers have with your business. Make sure you’re comprehensive in addressing each one — this includes customer service, social media, paid marketing efforts, and any other way you interact with customers.

In addition to eliminating clients that don’t generate any profit, you can focus your marketing efforts on those customers that generate the highest profits. Spend more time analyzing this group to attract similar high-revenue customers through marketing. A quick way to visualize profitability is by using the Client Profitability chart. This chart quickly highlights and orders clients by margin as well as contribution to total profits. The chart clearly shows the unprofitable clients and also shows what the profit would be if low performing clients were eliminated.