Both, manufacturing and service companies are operating ­today in an environment characterized by fundamental transformation and change: accelerated technological innovation and substantially shorter product life cycles, more complex customer needs, ever more sophisticated customer demands, and generally saturated markets. Competition has become stiffer and is putting more pressure on companies to adapt continuously to these difficult general conditions – at a strategic and operational level.

The professional management of lasting customer relationships was a major commercial success factor for companies long ­before any of this happened. The results of an OVUM customer study make this abundantly clear: 69% of the respondents stated that they would terminate a business relationship completely if the service were poor (OVUM: 2009 Business Trends: Consumer Preferences in Contact CenterInteractions. End-user Analysis of the Contact Center Market, January 2010 ). Consequently there are good reasons why companies are focusing on customer satisfaction more and more frequently as a key corporate goal; the growing of awareness of customer service, the main interface between companies and customers, as one of the load-bearing pillars of commercial ­activities is inexorable. The challenge here is to achieve economic balance between service excellence, customer satisfaction, and profitability!

Standardized customer service with the best possible features for every customer as it was commonly practiced until only a few years ago is neither economical nor sensible for companies. Differentiation in the customer relationships which is oriented especially to their customer lifetime value (CLV) is evidently en vogue. The concept of customer service differentiation, i.e., the segmentation of customers on the basis of concrete (value) criteria and the provision of tailored service according to that value segmentation, has been familiar for a long time and is by no means a new trend. However, most of the models for customer value assessment as practiced in the past have been one-dimensional and based on monetary parameters. Especially, the use of the ABC analysis, the profitability analysis, and the future potential analysis has been very common.