고객가치 평가모형에 관한 연구: 고객유지율과 Take-Off시점의 영향을 중심으로

Abstract

The recent movement to improve the marketing productivity has focused on CRM and its measurement. Particularly, as the competition is getting fierce in the market, companies are required to allocate its resources on more productive activities. According to the Customer Equity Model, companies would like to acquire customers, retain them and provide products or render services in a more profitable and efficient way. To meet those goals, companies need to understand the key marketing activities, which will eventually enhance the firm value along with customer values. Studies on assessing the customer lifetime value have been conducted by several researchers. Kim, Mahajan and Srivastava (1995) tested the model for customer lifetime value with actual data at the industry level. They developed a customer lifetime valuing model based on the study of Rappaport (1986), where the value is explained by the variables such as the number of subscribers, margin, investment per a new subscriber, cost of capital, tax rate and growth period. By testing the model with several scenarios on cost of capital and growth period, they found that their model fits well with lower cost of capital in the later stage of lifecycle and with shorter growth period in the early stage of lifecycle. Gupta, Lehmann and Stuart (2004) developed the customer valuing model, which can be applied to the individual company level with public data. Their valuing model includes four key independent variables of customer retention rate, margin, acquisition cost and discount rate. In estimating the number of customers, they basically used the Technical Substitution Model, which was also used in Kim, Mahajan and Srivastava (1995)’s model but they recognized customer cohorts by each time period, which defects by (1-retention rate) every quarter. They selected four companies in their high growth stage to show how their model can explain the firm values of the high growth companies, which the traditional financial valuing models can’t. They also test their model against one established company to show that their approach is capable of providing good estimates of firm value, similar to standard financial models. The result was that their model explained the firm values of three out of five. They also identified that out of the three main CRM activities, acquisition, retention and margin (up-selling), retention is the most crucial factor in determining the firm value. The importance of 1% improvement of retention rate in valuing customers is almost five times greater than a 1% change of discount rate or cost of capital. The study of Gupta, Lehmann and Stuart (2004) is very helpful to the management who want to know how the resources should be allocated among various marketing/ finance activities. The result of their study, however, requires further study in several points. First, they mainly used the data of high growth company in assessing their model’s fit, not considering other types of companies, which might bring some other conclusion. Second, their model estimated the firm value at t=0 regardless of the firm’s current position in its lifecycle. Lastly, they assumed that the retention rate is important in valuing customer compared to acquisition cost, margin and discount rate, which might different from company to company, depending on the company’s situation. This study recognized the above issues in the previous study. First, Gupta, Lehmann and Stuart (2004)’s customer-valuing model is modified in such a way that it reflects the customer value at the time of valuation. Only the cash flow on and after the time of valuation was considered in the valuation. Secondly, companies in more various industries are selected to confirm the fit of the model in all companies and industries. The selected companies are from Education industry (Mega-Study, YBM, Sisa dot_com, Dae-Kyo), Game & Internet industry (Webzen, NC Soft, NHN, Daum), Telecommunication service industry(SK Telecom, LG Telecom, KTF, Hanaro Telecom) and Security industry(S1). Finally, retention rate and take-off timing were considered in assessing the relative importance of retention rate on customer value against the impact of other valuing factors on the customer value. The modified Gupta, Lehmann and Stuart (2004)’s model was run on the twelve companies from four industries, producing the customer value of each company as of the end of 2004, which was in turn compared with the actual market value of each of the companies at the time of valuation. The result of this study shows that the customer-valuing model explains the value of the selected companies quite well except for the values of game and Internet companies, which have short-term cash generation cycle and low level of customer retention rate. The relative elasticity of each valuing factor on the customer value was assessed by the customer retention rate and timing of take-off. The test result showed that, as in the study of Gupta, Lehmann and Stuart (2004), the 1% improvement in the retention rate has the greatest impact on the firm value among CRM activities. However, the relative importance of retention rate against the discount rate was different, depending on the timing of take-off. That is, the shorter the timing of take-off is the greater the relative importance of retention rate on customer value against that of discount rate. Even though Gupta, Lehmann and Stuart (2004) didn’t say explicitly about the timing impact of take-off on the valuing customers, this result is quite in line with the study of Gupta and his colleagues based on the analysis of the five companies. This study made several contributions to the customer-valuing models. First, this study considered the valuation timing in estimating the cash flow, which enables the customer- valuing model to be used as practical valuation model. Second, by testing the model’s fit using diversified sample companies, this study enhanced the applicability of the model. Lastly, retention rate and timing of take-off were considered in assessing the relative importance of business activities including acquisition, retention, up-selling and financing or discount rate.