1. Introduction
Within any given customer base, there will be differences
in the revenues customers generate for the firm and in the
costs the firm has to incur to secure those revenues. While
most firms will know the customer revenues, many firms are
unaware of all costs associated with customer relationships.
In general, product costs will be known for each customer,
but sales and marketing, service, and support costs are
mostly treated as overhead. Customer profitability analysis
(CPA) refers to the allocation of revenues and costs to
customer segments or individual customers, such that the
profitability of those segments and/or individual customers
can be calculated.
The impetus for the increasing attention for CPA is
twofold. First, the rise of activity-based costing (ABC) in
the 1990s led to an increased understanding of the varying
extent to which the manufacturing of different products
used a firm’s resources (Cooper&Kaplan,1991;Foster&
Gupta, 1994). When using ABC, firms first identify cost
pools: categories of activities performed within the organization
(e.g., procurement). For all cost pools, cost drivers
areidentified:unitsinwhichtheresourceconsumptionof