Customer analysis

The first step in a comprehensive and systematic market development is the analysis of all information on customers and customer relationships (= customer analysis). Here, the information about customers and customer groups is collected, sorted, condensed and evaluated.

This customer analysis is the information base and thus also the decision-making base on how to position yourself as a company vis-à-vis your customers. Two resource views meet:

First of all, the customer resource is extremely scarce and valuable for the company. It has to be processed, exploited, maintained, protected, expanded and secured.

The other resource is sales. This resource includes employee capacities, delivery capacities, project management capacities and many other things that are relevant in the interface to the customer resource.

The customer analysis is the link between these two resources and serves the optimization, i.e. the maximization of the achievable output with (short-term) given resources.

First of all, the customer analysis is used to determine the importance of the customer. There are a number of tools to determine the importance of the customer, which will not be discussed in detail below. In short: you will have to make a lot of decisions about the criteria according to which customer importance is to be measured. In this context, questions arise such as:

• Do I measure the absolute return of a customer or the return?
• How do I record the consumption of values in my company through the customer relationship? Simplified: do I make a full cost calculation or a partial cost calculation?
• Do I rely on business already made or do I take into account expected business in the future?
• Do I take stock sizes as a basis, or do I use variables of change, such as a growth rate, as a basis?

•    Do key date values, period values or average values apply?

The use of historical data has the great advantage that this data is relatively easy to obtain and that its form is indisputable. The big disadvantage, however, is that the result of the analysis will then tend to confirm the status quo (= the big customers are the important ones = focus on existing customers). For this reason, a potential orientation has been gaining ground for a number of years – the challenge lies in the definition of potentials and the most objective possible determination of this potential! Ideally, the reward is also to receive possible need for action in (too) weak customer relationships and assessed target customer potentials.

Sometimes it is helpful to consider different dimensions, for example by weighting. In this way it can be achieved that the respective weaknesses of an approach are somewhat mitigated. On the other hand, it must be clear that the more factors that are taken into account and the more complex the key figure structure, the more average the results will be from the perspective of customer importance. In the end you have to die a death and decide on a – comparatively simple – procedure and commit to it.

In this context, commitment means accepting the results of the customer analysis, drawing the respective conclusions and implementing the consequences.

This analysis leads to various useful subsequent steps. The first and most obvious step is to derive a customer segmentation that follows the customer analysis or customer significance in a logically consistent manner. The result is a division of the customer portfolio into different customer classes or customer segments. The importance and value of the customer flow into this classification. Typical terms here are: A, B, C customers and of course top customers or key accounts. But the required customer access and support approach should (must) be taken into account in the customer segmentation. The customer segmentation thus becomes an aid to structure an existing customer portfolio and to make it manageable. And following portfolio theory, as it were, you can begin to design the customer portfolio in a targeted manner.

As part of the customer analysis (or in a subsequent step), a value destroyer analysis is carried out on a regular basis. In some companies it is also referred to as a value-added analysis. The principle is the same: it’s about identifying and determining the customers with whom the company makes money and with whom the company loses money.

A standardized customer strategy for a large part of the customer portfolio can be derived relatively easily from the combination of customer segment and value destroyer analysis. The art of implementation lies in being consistent as well as acting with a sense of proportion and common sense.