Profits, one customer at a time: CRM strategists often speak of improving company performance by boosting revenue on a per-customer basis. CRM magazine cuts through the hype to examine what individual customer profitability can--and cannot--do for your business.(Cover Story)

CRM Magazine, January, 2005 by Compton, Jason

Quarterly profit and loss is ultimately just an abstract aggregate of countless customer interactions. But company performance is bolstered or weakened one customer at a time, which is why it is no surprise that CRM theorists and practitioners often speak of the importance of measuring and acting on the profitability of each individual customer.

"It's the top of the playbook in terms of CRM strategies to understand customer profitability and segmenting, using that to drive the behavior of sales and marketing," says Robb Eklund, vice president of CRM product marketing for ...