Sometimes the practice of looking at your business from the customer's point of view can pay huge dividends. Case in point: <A HREF=”http://www.1to1.com/linkpass.aspx?Action=ExternalUrl&URL=www.hp.com&FROM=INSIDE&User_ID={user_id}&cid={campaign_id}”>Hewlett-Packard's</A> enterprise personalization program. After looking at how enterprise customers viewed their communications practices, HP has provided almost all of them with personalized information access, resulting in positive revenue and customer satisfaction scores to back its success.

By including all departments in its plan to
improve customer relationships, Coke boosted the value it
provides its B2B clients.

Many businesses straddle the fence between
serving customers and staying efficient. Experts from two top
companies say it's time to knock the fence down.

Do you know how much your customers cost?
</P>
<P>
All senior executives struggle with this question, and it has no easy answer. Every company is expected to acquire a fairly steady stream of new customers in the routine course of business. A rapidly expanding company in a new or growing category has a great deal of customer equity in the form of the lifetime values of customers it does not yet have but reasonably expects to have in the future.

The retailer learns the intricacies of its customer base to create an integrated communications strategy.

Watch out Wall Street: Besides measuring long-term customer value, ROC can also help keep corporate governance in check.

In late 2002 Rezidor SAS Hospitality, a hotel operator with more than 250 European locations, launched a two-tier loyalty initiative, spurred by the need to respond to competitive efforts and to devise membership schemes that would be compatible with Europe’s tightening personal information regulations. “We were recognizing that there were players coming into the marketplace that could own the customer instead of us, and we would merely be a commodity,” says Jacques Dubois, senior vice president of marketing distribution and CRM at Rezidor. For high-end business travelers, Rezidor decided to extend parent Carlson Companies' GoldPoints rewards brand, but felt that the leisure market needed something more accessible than a system designed to serve full-time road warriors.

Horizon Healthcare understands the value of human interaction when dealing with patients, doctors, and hospitals.

Citibank and Wachovia expand their points programs to reward customers for improving their share-of-wallet across services.

In the first installment of our reporter's notebook section, Ginger Conlon tracks the latest happenings from recent events.