Publications

May 2003
Background Note

Customer Management Strategy in Business Markets

By: Das Narayandas

Describes in detail customer management strategies in business markets, including selection decisions, design and management of customer relationship strategies, monitoring the health of customer relations, and linking the vendors' customer management effort to... View Details

Keywords: Customer Focus and Relationships; Customer Relationship Management; Decision Making; Networks; Customization and Personalization; Manufacturing Industry

02 Nov 2006
Working Paper Summaries

Organizational Response to Environmental Demands: Opening the Black Box

Keywords: by Magali A. Delmas & Michael W. Toffel

2006
Working Paper

The Value of a 'Free' Customer

By: Sunil Gupta, Carl F. Mela and Jose M. Vidal-Sanz

Central to a firm's growth and marketing policy is the revenus and profit potential of its customer assets. As a result, there has been a recent proliferation of work regarding customer lifetime value. However, extant research in this area is silent regarding how to... View Details

Keywords: Customer Value and Value Chain; Auctions; Network Effects; Business Strategy

Read Now

Research Summary

Multinational Enterprises and Corporate Responsibility

By: Nien-he Hsieh

Multinational enterprises, especially those operating in developing economies, face wide-ranging demands to help persons whose basic needs are unmet. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, are asked to provide access to life-saving therapies to patients in countries... View Details

25 Jul 2005
Research & Ideas

An Organization Your Customers Understand

to solve the organization structure problem. The solution will be derived through analysis of the first of our four Cs: customer definition. Using an "outside-in" approach, we will start by... View Details

Keywords: by Robert Simons

Aug 2011 - 2011
Conference Presentation

Innovation and Organizational Responses to Sustainability: An Institutional Perspective

By: Shon R. Hiatt

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Organizations

June 2010 (Revised September 2010)
Case

athenahealth: Innovating in Response to a Crisis in Healthcare

When Jonathan Bush and his partner, Todd Park, realized that their revolutionary approach to delivering clinical care was being stymied by the inefficiencies in the healthcare system and insurance red tape, they turned their proprietary technology, athenaNet, to a new... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Information Management; Innovation and Invention; Brands and Branding; Product Development; Health Industry; United States

20 Apr 2020
Blog Post

Introducing LivelyHood, A Volunteer Nonprofit Founded in Response to COVID-19

Justin Crist Lee (MBA 2021) is working to help launch LivelyHood, a COVID-19 volunteer response effort. LivelyHood is a platform that connects healthy, young volunteers with the elderly and immunocompromised... View Details

26 Mar 2019
Working Paper Summaries

Mitigating the Negative Effects of Customer Anxiety Through Access to Human Contact

Keywords: by Michelle A. Shell and Ryan W. Buell; Health

April 1995
Teaching Note

EMC Corporation: Response to Shareholder Litigation (Case Series) TN

By: Josh Lerner

Teaching Note for (9-294-070) and (9-294-071). View Details

14 Jan 2024
News

Business Schools Pushed to Provide a More Responsible Education

24 Apr 2014
News

Responsibility to set a good example in the community

Paul E. Viera, Jr. (MBA 1985), CEO of Earnest Partners LLC, talks about the importance of setting a good example and the value of his HBS alumni network. (Published April 2014) View Details

February 2007 (Revised May 2007)
Case

Bancaja: Developing Customer Intelligence (A)

In 1996, CEO Fernando Garcia Checa wanted to make customer analytics a part of Bancaja's new strategy. Bancaja, a savings bank based in Valencia, Spain, was expanding and wanted to exploit customer information to increase commercial effectiveness. At the same time, it... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Banking Industry; Spain

February 2018
Article

Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.

By: Eva Ascarza

Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details

Keywords: Retention/churn; Proactive Churn Management; Field Experiments; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Risk Management

Find at Harvard

Read Now

2012
Book

Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business

By: Frances Frei and Anne Morriss

Most companies treat service as a low-priority business operation, keeping it out of the spotlight until a customer complains. Then service gets to make a brief appearance—for as long as it takes to calm the customer down and fix whatever foul-up jeopardized the... View Details

Keywords: Customers; Business Ventures

Find at Harvard

Forthcoming
Article

Dynamic Competition for Customer Memberships

By: Cristian Chica, Julian Jimenez-Cardenas and Jorge Tamayo

A competitive two-period membership (subscription) market is analyzed. Two symmetric firms charge a “membership” fee that allows consumers to buy products or services at a given unit price for both periods. Firms can choose between long- or short-term memberships. When... View Details

Keywords: Competitive Price Discrimination; Membership; Dynamic Competition; Competition; Price; Consumer Behavior; Business Model