The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity

by Peter Fader, Bruce G.S. Hardie, Michael Ross

Overview

As a leader in your organization, you will be very familiar with your organization’s key financial statements and monthly management reports. You may have spent countless hours discussing budgets and expenditures.

But how much time have you spent reflecting on the fact that these revenues are generated by actual customers—the people who pull out their wallets and pay for your products and services? In The Customer-Base Audit: The First Step on the Journey to Customer Centricity, experts Peter Fader, Bruce Hardie, and Michael Ross start you on the path toward really getting to understand your customers’ buying behavior as well as the health of your overall customer base.

A customer-base audit is a systematic review of the buying behavior of a firm’s customers using data captured by its transaction systems. It will help you answer questions such as:

— How healthy is your customer base? How realistic are your growth objectives?
— How do your customers differ in terms of their behavior and value?
— How has the quality of your customers changed over time?
— What changes in customer behavior lie behind period-to-period changes in firm performance?
— What is important to your high-value customers? Which products help you acquire and retain your best customers?

Fader, Hardie, and Ross present five “lenses” through which an executive can address questions like those above. The answers are often lurking in various parts of the organization, but it is rare to find all the relevant analyses in one place, let alone performed on a regular basis (as an audit should be). Yet without such a basic, systematic understanding of the foundations of the firm’s primary source of cash flow, how can executives make informed decisions?

Fader, a Wharton professor, is the author of Customer Centricity and coauthor of The Customer Centricity Playbook, both of which have helped businesses radically rethink how they relate to customers. In this first step of the journey, Fader, Hardie, and Ross assist leaders in gaining a fundamental understanding of their customers’ buying behavior—and thus their company as a whole.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781613631607
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	11/01/2022
Pages:	218
Sales rank:	330,965
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Peter Fader is the Frances and Pei-Yuan Chia Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School of the Universityof Pennsylvania. His expertise centers on the analysis of behavioral data to understand and forecast customer shopping/purchasing activities. He works with firms from a wide range of industries, such as telecommunications, financial services, gaming/entertainment, retailing, and pharmaceuticals.

In addition to his various roles and responsibilities at Wharton, Fader co-founded a predictive analytics firm (Zodiac) in 2015, which was sold to Nike in 2018. He then co-founded (and continues to run) Theta to commercialize his more recent work on “customer-based corporate valuation.”

Fader is the author of Customer Centricity: Focus on the Right Customers for Strategic Advantage (2020, 2012) and coauthor of The Customer Centricity Playbook (2018) with Sarah Toms. He has won many awards for his research and teaching accomplishments.

Bruce Hardie is a Professor of Marketing at London Business School. For most of his career, his research has focused on developing tools for analyzing customer and marketing data. He has worked with market research firms and their clients on the development of marketing analytics solutions for new product sales forecasting and marketing mix analysis. He has collaborated extensively with Pete Fader, developing a number of key customer analytics tools for computing customer lifetime value (CLV) that have been used by thousands of data scientists and researchers around the world. He teaches courses on customer and marketing analytics, and the data-driven enterprise.

Michael Ross is a data agitator: he is currently SVP retail data science at EDITED, and a non-exec director at Sainsbury’s Bank, Domestic & General and N Brown Group plc. He has co-founded businesses including ecommera, DynamicAction and figleaves.com, and was also a consultant at McKinsey and Company. Michael has an MA in Mathematics from the Universityof Cambridge. He is also an Executive Fellow at London Business School, and is on the commercial board of the Turing Institute.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why a Customer-Base Audit? 1

Chapter 1 Setting the Scene 9

Chapter 2 The Data Cube and the Five Lenses 19

Chapter 3 How Different Are Your Customers? 37

Chapter 4 What Changed Since Last Period? 55

Chapter 5 How Does Customer Behavior Evolve? 71

Chapter 6 Comparing and Contrasting Cohort Performance 93

Chapter 7 How Healthy Is Our Customer Base? 109

Chapter 8 Bringing Back the Product Dimension 131

Chapter 9 Variations on a Theme 157

Conclusion: From Audit to Action 175

Notes 193

Index 195

About the Authors 205

About Wharton School Press 207

About the Wharton School 208

Editorial Reviews

"I once believed that product and brand alone were the answer to business growth, but learnt to appreciate the need to interrogate the business sales line through the lens of the customer. Customer behaviour must be understood at the most granular level to make a company truly customer focused; then combined with data based planning and decision making for the best possible outcomes. I now find myself passionate about the power of adding a data driven customer-centric lens to everything we do."

Sarah Welsh

"The Customer-Base Audit makes the complex simple. It shows how straightforward analysis can spotlight massive opportunities for change and is a must read for anyone who wants to do more for their customers."

Gill Barr

"The Customer-Base Audit brings clarity and rigor to the analysis of what is the most fundamental unit of analysis: the customer. The truth is that most executives don't understand their customers as well as they should, and this book provides them with the frameworks they need to gain insight and to guide their strategic decisions. It also equips investors with the right questions to ask managers. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand customers and how they create value."

Michael J. Mauboussin

"The Customer-Base Audit is a masterpiece that challenges companies to measure the differences and dynamics between their customers. A gateway into customer centricity, this important book is one you’ll devour and then proudly evangelize to the rest of your organization, bringing all those who listen to a path toward profitable, sustainable growth backed with conviction born from insurmountable data and an endless buffet of experience."

Neil Hoyne

"Understanding the nature (and value) of our customers’ behavior is central to every decision a bank makes, as well as the way those decisions are evaluated. I’ve been a strong advocate of formally assessing customer value for years, and I can’t think of a better way to do that than through a customer-base audit. The frameworks and analysis in The Customer-Base Audit are incredibly useful for any company and should be part of every analytics team’s repertoire. Further, boards and executives should be demanding this type of work from their analytics leaders."

Zachery Anderson

"The Customer-Base Audit brings a long-overdue customer focused structure and discipline to the practice of business decision-making. Fader, Hardie and Ross take away the mystery and uncertainty associated with customer analytics, replacing it with a comprehensive approach that no company should ignore."

Rob Markey

"The Customer-Base Audit, by Fader, Hardie, and Ross, provides a practical and example-rich hands-on guide to their core methods of analyzing customer data. The authors, who are master teachers and practitioners of this field, point out that executives know so much about their products, yet so little about their customers. For most of history, customer specific data was not readily available, so people were not trained to analyze it and there were no good guides to doing so. But with the digital age, it now becomes possible and imperative to view a business through the lens of customer data. This book is a must-read guide that will empower leaders for a generation and spur countless insights within organizations of all kinds."

Barney Pell

"Fader, Hardie, and Ross’s practical, logical and commonsense approach to data analysis is refreshing when compared with the myriad of confusion that normally reigns in understanding consumer behaviour."

Mark Newton-Jones

"I would be a rich man if I had been paid a pound every time I had been told in the last 40 years or so that if only we had a reliable, complete view of the behaviour of each customer, we could become a much more successful business. This book shows the reader how to take the steps to achieve this."

David Tyler