When is a customer ‘lost’? – Segmenting by activity rate.

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Central to the principles of strategy dynamics is knowing how quickly resources are being won and lost. This is easy enough for most – you know when you close capacity, hire or lose staff, or discontinue products – but can be surprisingly tricky with customers. You would imagine that banks or telecoms firms, for example, know exactly when a customer is lost because that’s when they close their account – not so!

Often, the customer is really lost much earlier, when ...

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De-skilling globalising law firms

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Yet another great piece at SMS – also not yet published – from Susan Segal-Horn and Alison Dean. What happens when corporate law-firms go international? Seems from in-depth research on their reports that – amongst other things – they start de-skilling, with a larger proportion of work being done by non-qualified lawyers [paralegals etc.], and start reporting their performance differently. Instead of reporting ‘profit per equity partner’ they focus on profit per partner [all types] and ...

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