The MiSmanagement of Customer LoyaltyThe high-tech corporate sewice provider produced a costing scheme in order to（）

A．find out the most loyal customer.
B．reduce the investment in generating customer loyalty.
C．launch a campaign to find out the potential customers.
D．obsewe the relationship between customer loyalty and profit.

The best customers, we’re told, are loyal ones. They cost less to serve, they’re usually willing to pay more than other customers. and they often act as word-of-mouth marketers for your company. Win loyalty, therefore, and profits will follow as night follows day. Certainly that’s what CRM software vendors—and the armies of consultants who help install their systems—are claiming. And it seems that many business executives agree. Corporate expenditures on loyalty initiatives are booming：The top 16 retailers in Europe, for example, collectively spent more than $1 billion last year。Indeed, for the last ten years, the gospel of customer loyalty has been repeated so often and so loudly that it seems almost crazy to challenge it.

But that is precisely what some of the loyalty movement’s early believers are starting to do. Take the case of one high-tech corporate service provider. This company set up an elaborate costing scheme to track the performance of its newly instituted loyalty programs. The scheme measured not only direct product costs for each customer but also all associated advertising, service, sales force, and organizational expenses. After running the scheme for five years, the company was able to determine the profitability of each of its accounts over time. Executives were curious to see just what payoff they were getting from their $2 million annual investment in customer loyalty.

The answer took them by surprise. About half of those customers who made regular purchases for at least two years—and were therefore designated as ‘loyal’—barely generated a profit. Conversely, about half of the most profitable customers were blow-ins, buying a great deal of high-margin products in a short time before completely disappearing.

The research findings echo that company’s experience. Some experts have been studying the dynamics of customer loyalty and have found that the relationship between loyalty and profitability is much weaker—and subtler—than the proponents of loyalty programs claim. Specifically, they discovered little or no evidence to suggest that customers who purchase steadily from a company over time are necessarily cheaper to serve, less price sensitive, or particularly effective at bringing in new business.

Indeed, in light of their findings, many companies will need to reevaluate the way they manage customer loyalty programs. Instead of focusing on loyalty alone, companies will have to find ways to measure the relationship between loyalty and profitability so that they car better identify which customers to focus on and which to ignore. The experts have found. a new methodology that will enable managers to determine far more precisely than most existing approaches do just when to let go of a given customer and so dramatically improve the returns on their investments in loyalty.