This paper is based on the premise that the intangible asset of a company, in form of its employees and customers, and the relationship the company forms with these constituencies, are what create value and generate profit. The authors build upon more than a decade of extensive research and consulting to demonstrate that companies can indeed base their entire business model around linking intangible assets to organisational value and building a metric-based management system.
This paper deals with profitability enhancement in retail banking. More explicitly we will focus on how banks can gain understanding of customer bases in order to enhance profits. We will argue for proper segmentation approaches, where profitability of the customer relationship is a central ingredient of the analyses. Segmentation will be a central theme and we try to show what developments are needed in order to cope with the turbulence in the business environment. The paper will be of a theoretical nature. Empirical observations will be limited, and serve more as illustrations of our approach.
The purpose of this paper is to give some guidelines of how one can set suitable levels of service components. It is too much to say that we will present a methodology for this purpose. We provide some indications of what can be done. In the paper we will empirically focus on the employee resource. It is though clear that our way of dealing with the problem has more general applicability. The paper is arranged in the following way. We will continue by discussing some aspects of quality in services. After this we will briefly cover three independent studies, where we point out that a high standard of the personnel does not convey value or utility to consumers in the expected way. This leads to a discussion on how one can assess quality levels, in order to achieve more successful results in operating a service business.