PhD-projekt:

Customer valuation

I am enrolled at the government’s industrial PhD program which is intended as a “joint venture” between academia and Danish companies. My corporate sponsor on the project is the Scandinavian management consultancy Quartz+Co (www.quartzco.com).

In my project I investigate how the financial value of customer relationships can be measured and to what extent these customer valuation techniques are successfully implemented in firms. The main thesis is that firms across industries will benefit from monitoring customer value on a regular basis as it allows them to allocate their resources in accordance with the profit potential of customers and/or segments. However, highly different degrees of sophistication of customer valuation models are expected to be required depending on the types of customers firms serve. This, in turn, may influence the speed at which customer valuation models are implemented in firms across different customer environments.

Based on the above four key objectives for the project have been carved out:

(1) To outline the range of theoretical models available for estimating the financial value of customer relationships.

(2) To test whether the use of financial customer valuation techniques for resource allocation purposes leads to improved firm performance.

(3) To investigate how the type of customer environment influences the customer valuation models adopted by firms.

(4) To explore the determinants of customer valuation model diffusion across firms.

A survey is being conducted to gather empirical data from a population of the 1.000 largest companies in Denmark and Sweden respectively. This allows me to test the hypotheses that are related to the objectives above on cross-sectional data.