مدل LTV و تقسیم بندی مشتریان بر اساس ارزش مشتری : یک مطالعه موردی روی صنعت مخابرات بی سیم

Since the early 1980s, the concept of relationship management in marketing area has gained its importance. Acquiring and retaining the most profitable customers are serious concerns of a company to perform more targeted marketing campaigns. For effective customer relationship management, it is important to gather information on customer value. Many researches have been performed to calculate customer value based on Customer lifetime value (LTV). It, however, has some limitations. It is difficult to consider the defection of customers. Prediction models have focused mainly on expected future cash flow derived from customers' past profit contribution. In this paper we suggest an LTV model considering past profit contribution, potential benefit, and defection probability of a customer. We also cover a framework for analyzing customer value and segmenting customers based on their value. Customer value is classified into three categories: current value, potential value, and customer loyalty. Customers are segmented according to three types of customer value. A case study on calculating customer value and segmenting customers of a wireless communication company will be illustrated.

Customer relationship management (CRM) has become one of the leading business strategies in the new millennium. It is difficult to find out a totally approved definition of CRM. We, however, can describe it as ‘Managerial efforts to manage business interactions with customers by combining business processes and technologies that seek to understand a company's customers’ (Kim, Suh, & Hwang, 2003), i.e. structuring and managing the relationships with customers. CRM covers all the processes related to customer acquisition, customer cultivation, and customer retention. Even though we put aside the existing studies, which assert that it costs more to acquire new customers than to retain the existing customers, we can imagine that customer cultivation and retention are more important than customer acquisition because lack of information on new customers makes it difficult to select target customers and this will cause inefficient marketing efforts. Therefore, in customer cultivation and retention, ‘How big profits a certain customer can contribute to a company’ is an important issue. Moreover, precise evaluation of customer value and targeted customer segmentation must be critical parts for the success of CRM especially for the industries like wireless communication industry, which are in the middle of stiff competitions and rapid customer churn. Generally, three core works are necessary for the increase of customer value: up-selling, cross-selling, and customer retention (Kim, 2000). Up-selling is selling the same kinds of products that a customer has already bought and cross-selling is selling what a customer have never bought, i.e. new kinds of products for the customer. Customer retention means the effort to keep our customers being stayed as ours, prohibiting them from changing their minds. It is reasonable to consider these three sides when we consider customer value, accordingly. The scope of CRM activities is shown in Fig. 1.

Many CRM researches pertain to develop a comprehensive model of customer profitability since the question ‘Who are profitable customers?’ is a starting point of CRM. Many models have been researched to calculate LTV of a customer. Most of them focused on the future cash flow derived from the past profit contribution. In some industry, however, it is inadequate to consider only expected future cash flow to calculate LTV because stiff competition results in frequent customer defection and defection affects customer profitability much (Knox, 1998). In this paper, we suggested an LTV model considering the past contribution, potential value, and churn probability at the same time. The model can also be used for customer segmentation. Three perspectives on customer value (current value, potential value, and customer loyalty) assist marketing managers in identifying customers segmentation with more balanced viewpoints. Current value provides financial viewpoint and potential value indicates cross-selling opportunity. Customer loyalty estimates durability of the previous two values. In the future, we expect that this study will spur further extensions of developing the more general LTV models considering the characteristics of the industry and customers such as reactivation possibility, attracting/servicing cost and causes of customer defection.