Publications

2019
Working Paper

Managing Churn to Maximize Profits

By: Aurelie Lemmens and Sunil Gupta

Customer defection threatens many industries, prompting companies to deploy targeted, proactive customer retention programs and offers. A conventional approach has been to target customers either based on their predicted churn probability, or their responsiveness to a... View Details

Keywords: Churn Management; Defection Prediction; Loss Function; Stochastic Gradient Boosting; Customer Relationship Management; Consumer Behavior; Profit

SSRN

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Article

Are Self-service Customers Satisfied or Stuck?

By: Ryan W. Buell, Dennis Campbell and Frances X. Frei

This paper investigates the impact of self-service technology (SST) usage on customer satisfaction and retention. Specifically, we disentangle the distinct effects of satisfaction and switching costs as drivers of retention among self-service customers. Our empirical... View Details

Keywords: Service Delivery; Information Technology; Customer Satisfaction; Competition; Cost; Banks and Banking; Behavior; Market Transactions; Management Analysis, Tools, and Techniques

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June 2013
Case

Olympic Rent-A-Car U.S.: Customer Loyalty Battles

By: John Deighton and James T. Kindley

The marketing and operations managers for Olympic Rent-A-Car meet to decide how to respond to changes in the loyalty rewards program at the market-leading competitor. The competitor's program gives awards based on dollars spent instead of days rented and eliminates... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Competitive Strategy; Marketing; Operations; Auto Industry; Service Industry

05 Aug 2010
What Do You Think?

What Is Customer Opinion Good For?

research and shoring up the weakest, all competitors' products take on the same characteristics. As she puts it, "Meanwhile, the very instruments that these managers are relying on to establish and reinforce differentiation—competitive... View Details

Keywords: by Jim Heskett; Technology

March 31, 2023
Article

What Is the Optimal Pattern of a Customer Journey?

By: Julian De Freitas

Even though customer experience (CX) leaders are becoming increasingly focused on optimizing their firms’ customer journeys, they face a clear challenge: Which touchpoints along the journey should they invest in? That is, which moments when the customer interacts with... View Details

Keywords: Consumer Behavior; Customers; Brands and Branding

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April 2004 (Revised June 2004)
Teaching Note

Starbucks: Delivering Customer Service (TN)

By: Youngme E. Moon and John A. Quelch

Teaching Note to (9-504-016). View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Food and Beverage Industry

October 2001 (Revised October 2017)
Supplement

Pilgrim Bank (B): Customer Retention

By: Frances X. Frei and Dennis Campbell

Supplements the (A) case. View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Banking Industry

December 2017
Case

Molino Cañuelas: Serving Customers from Seed Development to the Kitchen Table

By: Jose B. Alvarez, Maria Fernanda Miguel and Mariana Cal

Molino Cañuelas was a vertically integrated food company with a management system that allowed it to innovate and grow systematically. With sales of $2 billion in 2016, the firm not only produced flour, vegetable oil, and packaged food products, it also owned a port... View Details

Keywords: Quality Management System; Food Industry; Molino Cañuelas; Argentina; Vertical Integration; Quality; Management Systems; Expansion; Global Range; Growth and Development Strategy; Agribusiness; Food and Beverage Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Argentina

April 1995 (Revised April 1995)
Case

Pillsbury: Customer Driven Reengineering

By: Robert S. Kaplan

Pillsbury is transforming itself from an integrated producer of flour and bakery products to a value-added supplier of premium branded products. After initial successes applying activity-based costing to manufacturing operations, two senior executives decide to... View Details

Keywords: Organizational Change and Adaptation; Production; Cost Management; Activity Based Costing and Management; Customer Value and Value Chain; Food and Beverage Industry

2012
Chapter

Firing Your Best Customers: How Smart Firms Destroy Relationships Using CRM

By: Jill Avery and Susan Fournier

With incidences in the 20%–25% range, the practice of firing customers has become increasingly attractive as firms try to maximize the lifetime value of their customer portfolios. This chapter traces the relationship trajectory of a 30-year customer of Filene's... View Details

Keywords: Brands; Brand Management; CRM; Customer Relationship Management; Customer Focus and Relationships; Customers; Marketing; Brands and Branding; Marketing Communications; Marketing Strategy; Consumer Products Industry

March 2000 (Revised February 2005)
Case

Hewlett Packard--Computer Systems Organization: Selling to Enterprise Customers

By: Das Narayandas and Robert C. Dudley

In late 1996, Manuel Diaz, head of Worldwide Sales for Hewlett-Packard's (HP) Computer Systems Organization (CSO), is reviewing the results of an audit of HP's enterprise customer management approach with the objective of identifying market and organizational... View Details

Keywords: Accounting Audits; Transformation; Customer Relationship Management; Cost vs Benefits; Marketing Strategy; Sales; Computer Industry

21 Mar 2016
HBS Case

Can Customer Reviews Be 'Managed?'

actually booking and get a commission of that?” Q: You call the case “managing online reviews.” As I read it, I thought the notion of managing online reviews seems to be counter to the notion of providing unbiased information. Yet you do... View Details

Keywords: by Brian Kenny; Advertising; Travel

June 2023
Article

National Customer Orientation: An Empirical Test across 112 Countries

By: Ofer Mintz, Imran S. Currim and Rohit Deshpandé

Customer orientation is a central tenet of marketing. However, less is known about how customer orientation varies across countries and time. Mintz, Currim, and Deshpandé (Eur. J. Mark., 56: 1014–1041, 2022) propose a country-level construct, national customer... View Details

Keywords: Global Range; Customer Focus and Relationships

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March 2011
Background Note

Customer Loyalty Schemes in the Retail Sector

By: Jose B. Alvarez and Aldo Sesia

Customer loyalty schemes (or programs) are explicit efforts by retailers to gain long-term patronage from customers. Loyalty schemes are developed for a variety of reasons: to reward loyal customers, to generate more robust information about customer behavior, to... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Consumer Behavior; Business Strategy; Retail Industry; United Kingdom; United States

16 May 2011
Research & Ideas

What Loyalty? High-End Customers are First to Flee

customers who are more valuable over time. "One prescription from all of this is that managers should avoid service complacency—or the tendency to rely on preexisting service advantages—and invest more... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

February 2008
Case

Campbell Soup Company: Selling Channel Innovation to Customers

Campbell Soup, like most food manufacturers, faced grocery chain and wholesale demand for its goods driven by Campbell's own promotional pricing structure rather than retail consumer demand. Former policies to encourage overstock created huge swings in production and... View Details

Keywords: Information Technology; Distribution Channels; Order Taking and Fulfillment; Manufacturing Industry; Food and Beverage Industry

28 Feb 2022
Research & Ideas

How Racial Bias Taints Customer Service: Evidence from 6,000 Hotels

had a white name. Customers who sounded white were called by name 74 percent of the time, compared to 61 percent of customers assumed to be Black and 57 percent who were presumably Asian. The data indicates... View Details

Keywords: by Pamela Reynolds

May 2024
Background Note

Net Revenue Retention: Unpacking the Dynamics of Customer Monetization

By: Elie Ofek, Barak Libai and Eitan Muller

Firms and investors alike are beginning to recognize the importance of tracking how revenues from existing customers are evolving over time and to appreciate the value in understanding what might explain changes in these revenues. Consequently, in addition to looking... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Revenue; Measurement and Metrics; Customer Value and Value Chain