Customer Relationship Management in New Business Models

Abstract

Customer relationship management is essential because companies are customer-centric, especially in new business models. In some sectors, each individual customer can determine the company’s success in a significant extent. A well-founded decision-making process reduces the number of critical situations, particularly in volatile markets. Furthermore, a trustful customer relationship has several advantages, for example, reduced transaction costs with less information asymmetries. A forward-looking customer relationship management anticipate relevant factors at an earlier stage in the decision-making process. New business models require a more precise customer and accompanying risk analysis, which allows an effective view of the customer’s life cycles. In this context, an innovative management accounting approach for customer relationships is necessary. The managerial implications derived from such processes crucially hinge among other things on the risk assessment. Consequently, this article presents a systematic customer-oriented calculation approach to evaluate customer relationships in new business models. Considering the multifactorial perspective, simulation techniques are a useful approach to solve sophisticated decision situations for shaping customer relationships. The introduced approach can be transferred to other sectors with important customer-centric relationships.