Portfolio of Customers

Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.

  Communications Management   CRM   Estimating   Portfolio Management   Stakeholder Management   Talent Management  

It’s easy to think of customers as a form of business asset. They help with our cash flow (albeit in a less reliable way), and therefore stretch our common understanding of just what an asset is. They can be quite risky as a result, since their business experience is often quite different than our own. They are more relationship-bound and temperamental as well, making them less predictable and manageable--particularly when you consider that their control comes from outside our jurisdiction.

Unlike many assets, the value of a customer relationship is hard to measure. You might be able to determine how much in terms of dollars and cents their collaborations have benefited you, but estimating the true cash value they represent is tough to determine. They are commodities that cannot be bought, sold or traded, yet they are something we try to hoard. Add to that the fact that, pending contractual obligations, a customer has the power to leave you at a moment’s notice, and you have an extremely tenuous grasp on that asset’s profitability.

When gauging our portfolio of returns, we also make decisions on expectations or what we expect to get out of an investment. For customers, it is an extremely resource-heavy proposition with a combination of issues like manpower, infrastructure and technology. Our choices in retaining and maintaining an asset also are …

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