Mungo Dunnett Associates: Management and Marketing Consultancy

Customer Profitability

Background

We have found that no single piece of work is more valuable to any organisation than the ability to identify which customers are generating the lion’s share of their profit.

This sounds so obvious, yet in industry after industry companies do not have this key information – the information that drives their bottom line – at their fingertips. Sometimes this is because the data is deemed ‘too hard’ to produce; or time pressure in a small team prevents it from being addressed; or it is not considered sufficiently important to alter the established working practices of the business.

Key to this is finding information that is sufficiently robust to be useable – and then having the courage to use it, even where this alters established practices. Our approach varies slightly from company to company, but the following sections outline a typical profitability project.