Customer Analytics with Profitability Solution

In the last post ‘Revenue is means and not end’, we saw that it is important to understand the customer profitability for taking business decisions around customer acquisition and retention strategy. I had made a point that once we know the profitability of various customers; we can understand who is creating profit and who is creating a loss. When we get this information we should not directly jump to the conclusion that we have to ‘chuck’ all those loss making customers. Initially we may concentrate on the other customers and define the strategy to acquire and make deliberate attempts to retain the profit making customers. We may not take any action on ‘loss making’ customers, if we wish to, as there could be various reasons to do so.

We have seen the ‘whale curve’ diagram, which tells us the information about potential to reach a profitability level that our organization has. The same information can utilized to understand the behavior of the customers and how to use the same to maximize the profits for our organization. I am going to talk about one of the techniques, which I call as a ‘2x 2 diagrams’. It has many other names also. This is nothing but a scatter diagram using two characteristics of customers. Imaginary thresholds are created to distribute the scatter diagram into four quadrants. I found it useful for the reason that once we start using these diagrams, we can understand the reasons for the behavior of the customers and hence, we can have our strategy to tackle those customers for our better performance. I have used possible actions in those diagrams and would like to mention that these could be some actions that you can take but are not limited to those only.

1) Customer deciles

Before going to the 2 x 2 diagram I am going to talk about another way in which the whale curve can be projected. Here we have created deciles of the customers based on their profitability. Once we have created such groups, we can understand who is falling in which group. This is a kind of segmentation based on the profitability. Once this segmentation is done then we can start analyzing the behavior of those customers that are making high profits as well as that are making high losses. The reasons could be buying profitable products, less cost to serve, good payment terms, less special requests, using better channels etc. Using these various reasons we can further segment the deciles in behavior patterns. This kind of detail analysis is useful to relate the behavior of a customer to the profitability that is brought in.

2) 2 x 2 - Customer Revenue and Profit

This is based on the information available on the revenue and profit that is brought in by the customers. We start with the top-right corner (HH). Here the customer buying is high and the profits are also high. This means the customers are not only bringing revenue they are possibly buying the most profitable products or less cost to serve. This type of customers should be retained at any cost. As well analyze their other demographic characteristics and try to acquire similar type of customers in future. The L-H quadrant is where the revenue is low but profits are high. Obviously we should sell more and more with cross sell, up sell efforts, so that we get maximum of the ‘wallet share’ from the customers. The H-L quadrant shows high revenue but not such a great profit. This could be possibly because of the product mix, cost to serve, payment terms etc. We can offer them alternate products that can serve customer’s requirements and are more profitable, we can offer ‘menu based pricing’ for few of the services. We may also remove some the services that are not adding value to the customer. The lat quadrant L-L, is low revenue and low profitability. We should try to move them horizontally to increase the revenue or vertically to increase profits.

3) 2 x 2 – Cost to serve and revenue

From the earlier analysis if we find that the basic reason for difference in profitability is the behavior of the customer and particularly the ‘cost to serve (CTS)’, then we can analyze this behavior and can understand the reasons, which could be the buying patterns, special requests, channels used, changes in schedules, changes in requirements after ordering, knowledge about the product etc. Let us look at the quadrants. The L-L quadrant is where the CTS is low but the revenue is also low. We should try to sell more by cross sell, up sell strategy and keeping the services levels same. The H-L quadrant shows high CTS and low revenue. So the customer is too demanding. Here we can discuss the real requirements of the services that are needed by the customer. First of all remove all the services that are not needed by the customer. We can make our customer understand the more number of orders, frequent changes in the orders and products, special packing needs are adding costs and could be reconsidered. Then from the required one decide which can be offered by default and the other can be pushed to ‘pay per use’. The L-H quadrant is the best quadrant here and we should try to sell more and more to the customers in this quadrant with the similar level of service.

4) 2 x 2 – Loyalty and Profitability

The 2 x 2 diagram of loyalty and customer profitability can be used to allocate and program the marketing campaigns. Here the H-H quadrant shows that the customers are with you for a sufficient amount of time and they are profitable too. You can use these customers as your brand ambassadors. Understand their requirements and keep them happy. The H-L quadrant is happy with your service o products, but they may not be buying with a full potential from you. So you may spend more on cross selling or up selling to them. They may not be buying the most profitable products from you, so you can try to sell alternate products to them. The L-H quadrant is there the customers are profitable but they are not with you for a long time. This could be the customers are new or they like your products but may not like the service. Understand the requirement of those customers and improve the service or try to retain the new customers that are adding to your portfolio. The L-L quadrant may not be looked into initially, unless there is large number of customers lying there or a major portion of revenue is coming from those customers. If this is true then it really a cause of concern for the organization and should be given priority.

In some industries like telecom, the value of ‘probability to churn’ is used instead of loyalty. This is the probability that the customer is likely to terminate using your services. There we can use the similar graph with an attribute ‘churn’ instead of loyalty.

Till now we have seen various attributes for analysis which are objective and historic. But we can also use the attributes which are analytical and predictive. Probability to churn is one of such attributes. We can use similar attribute that is related to profitability and is called as ‘Future profitability’. The profitability we were talking of was the ‘current profitability’. Not all the decisions can be taken based on the current profitability or the historic profitability of the customer. We also have to see the future profitability potential in the customer. The future profitability is actually made up of two parts viz. a) predictive profitability b) potential profitability. Predictive profitability is if you extrapolate the profitability because of the products or the services that the customers are using in future. Potential profitability is the profitability that is brought in because of the customers propensity to buy other products and if they do buy, the profitability band they would fall in.

5) 2 x 2 – Current and future profitability

Here we are putting the current profit v/s the future profit (combination of predictive and potential profit). Profitability solutions provide the information about the current profitability for the customers. If the organization has calculated such ‘current’ profitability for a long period they would have history about the profit. Using this information and other variables statistical models can be created to calculate the future potential of profit. This is important to understand as the customers that are unprofitable today may have potential to be profitable in future and vice-a-versa. The text book example for this is the young doctor who has started his practice recently may not look profitable today but she can have potential to bring profits in future. Also a doctor who is potentially retiring in few years may look profitable today and had provided good results in past may not be a good future potential.

If we look at the L-L quadrant where the current and future profit looks low, you may not want act on them immediately (unless this is a large portion of customers). The L-H quadrant where the current profit is low but there is good potential in future. Here you would like sell more to them by understanding there requirements. For example for the young doctor in the earlier example it may start with the credit products for the clinic and may have potential to buy house and bigger or luxurious cars etc. H-L quadrant is where the current profit is high but does not look great in future. You can maintain the current relationship with them and the marketing spend may not allocated much to them. The best is the H-H quadrant where the current and the future profit look good. The strategy could be to retain these customers at any cost and acquire customers with similar profile.

6) 2 x 2 – Predictive and potential profitability

We can also go deeper in future profitability and see the analysis of predictive profitability against the potential profitability. If we look at L-L quadrant then we can see that if both predictive and potential profitability is going to be low then the overall future profitability is going to be low and we may not wish take immediate action (as always if this is not true for the major section of customer). In the L-H section we can see that the customer would be profitable in future with the same type of products but the behavior shows that the propensity to but other product is good. This may bring future profits for the organization and you may choose them for cross selling other products. H-L section is opposite to this and shows that these customers are unlike to buy other products but they can be profitable with the current products they are having. So the organization may look at up selling. For the H-H section where they would be profitable with current products have great potential for buying new products and could be profitable with those new also. The best segment of customers to have and you can try and spend more on selling them.

We have looked at various types of analysis that we can perform using the profitability information. These attributes could be objective as revenue, loyalty etc. or could be predictive (and hence subjective) like propensity to churn, future profitability. The future historic, current and future profitability information can be used to calculate Customer Lifecycle Value (CLV) and it can also be used for analysis. For this you need correct calculation of Customer profitability and the best way to get is using Activity Based Management Concept.

Finally wish you happy holidays. Hope you have done well in 2009 and best wishes for 2010.

Revenue is means and not end

The three major challenges that Activity based Management (ABM) concept helps to get insight into are

• Understanding profitability of products and customers
• Understanding the process costs and the drivers of those costs
• Understanding the resource utilization and planning resources for the future

Let us take the first challenge of understanding the Customer profitability. I have mentioned in my earlier posts also that whenever we use the word ‘costing’ it is always assumed that we are talking about ‘product costing’. This assumption has always led us to take all the costs to the product (whichever methodology of costing you use). The obvious effect of this thinking is that we always calculate and talk about the profitability of products. And we almost ignore the fact that a product sold to different customers can bring different profits (even if the selling price is the same).

As a follower of ABM concept when I try to explain the prospects that the customer profitability is not the revenue less the ‘total product cost’, most of the time they fail to understand (at least initially). Customer profitability is ‘revenue less cost to produce the product less cost to serve’.

As the product cost is assumed the same for all the customers, those customers who buy in more quantity and hence bring more revenue are supposed to be the more profitable customers. In this way revenue has become the most important ‘Performance Indicator (PI)” for any sales person in most of the organizations. The performance incentive or commission is also based on the revenue not only for the sales employees but the partners for sales also.

On this background I would like to present the information that the ABM project can display with respect to customer profitability.

a)

This is graph which plots the customers on the x-axis and the cumulative profitability on the y-axis. The typical scenario shows that, the top 12-15 % of the customers provide you the 100% of the profits you are getting today. Theoretically if you cater only these customers you will the same profit that you are getting today. The next observation is the first 35-40% of the customers take the profits to 350% of the profit. The middle 40% of the customers are almost ‘no profit – no loss’ and the last 20% of the customers who are practically loss making bring the 350% of the profits back to the 100% i.e. your current profits.

This graphical presentation helps the organization to understand their own profit potential and also who are their top 20% of the customers as well as who are bottom 20% of the customers.

b) 2x2 diagram for customer profitability

Once the organization has understood the ‘who-is-where’ from the whale curve, it is natural for the organization is to think of taking actions. The graph shown above is one of the useful graphs for the same. In this graph, the information about the customers is plotted revenue v/s the profit. This type of analysis not only segregates the customers, but gives a possible action plan. To retain the customers in the ‘high revenue-high profit’ quadrant at any cost and moving in some other quadrant the customers from ‘low revenue-low profit’ area.

The typical reaction from the people is that if we cannot do anything about the last 20% of the customers or the customers in the ‘low revenue-low profit’ quadrant, what the use of the information is. You do not have to guess that these are people from the Finance function.

This is information is not only for understanding who the worst are and the action is to be taken only for them. The other 80% of the customers in the first graph and the customers in the other 3 quadrants in the second graph are also important.

It is important to understand who your profitable or unprofitable customers are but also important to know why they are profitable or unprofitable. This helps the organization to focus on the type of customers to be acquired in future or retained. If you want move the customers from unprofitable to profitable zone what is that you have to do. Even in case of the unprofitable customers it is not always taking them away. You can try to move them to move horizontally to ‘high revenue’ zone or vertically to ‘high profitability’ zone by taking various actions. If all the actions do not lead to the better performance it could be still good for your organizations to lose those customers as this will improve your profitability and possibly reduce the profitability of your competitors.

This view is not only taken by the Finance person but by the Sales person as well and the main reason is that there is revenue coming from those customers. The Finance person can afford to say that if she cannot do anything with the unprofitable customers, there is not use of the information, but the CEO cannot say this. The purpose of a commercial enterprise is to earn a return on investment, not to generate sales. Any sales person that refuses to try to make his account a more profitable customer for the company should be made to walk the plank.

Incremental progress is better than delayed, or unattained, perfection

This is an old saying that keeps on coming back to my mind every now and then. This is because there are discussions going on Activity Based Costing (ABC) lately. These discussions are happening in person, workshops, networking sites on the Internet. The talks are about the results that it provides and the requirement of data for creating and maintaining the ABC models. It is now well known to the people that having an ABC system would provide a better understanding of the costs and hence the profitability of the products or customers. But at the same time they are worried about the efforts that they have to put to collect the data.

It is true that, this requires some efforts to create the model in your organization, but it is not to the extent that is cannot be managed. Some of the statements are like “Do we have now perform the time study using a stop watch for all the departments?” “Do we have to enter activities for which the expense has happened, like we enter the cost center?” “Do we have to change the chart of accounts?” Actually they are reluctant to do all these things for getting more accurate costs. But to their surprise, when we say it not necessary to do all these things, then people do swing from one extreme to the other. Their feeling is, if we are doing all this, then are we really doing ABC, or are we really going to get more accurate costs?

Let us see what kind of data is required for ABC models. We sill split this into two parts, first the efforts and data for the first time when we are creating the model and then the efforts and data required to maintain the model.

Efforts and data required for the first time –

1) Cost center accounting
2) Activities for the cost centers
3) Time taken by each activity (sustainable and repeatable)
4) Volume of those activities for various departments, products or customers
5) Output quantity or sold quantity

Efforts and data required for maintaining the ABC model –

1) Cost center accounting
2) Volume of the activities for various departments, products or customers
3) Output quantity or sold quantity

Out of all this, the definition of activities and the time taken for the same are the one time efforts. This information does not change unless the organization has really changed their way of working drastically. The new information that is to be collected is the volume of the activities. And I admit that there will be some resistance from the various departments to provide this data. This is not new. When we implemented the ERPs in our organization there was similar type resistance from various departments. For example the purchase department did not have to enter all the taxes in detail. They used to write ‘taxes as applicable’. Now in the ERPs they have to create a detailed ‘pricing schema’ with all the taxes mentioned with their accurate rates. This has to be done for each ‘item-vendor’ combination. Similar was the case for ‘Sales order’ and the sales function. The manufacturing (shop floor) people were not ready to confirm the various steps in ‘routing’ that was created for each part. But ERP (or OLTP) has become an integral part of most of the organization across globe. People have accepted these changes and working according to it. Of course technology has helped them to automate some these.

This was about the quantum of new data that is required. Now we will talk about the accuracy of the data required. This is important as the accuracy of the data decides the availability of the data as well as the efforts to collect the data if available. In the current state of It initiatives in various organizations 80% of the data required regularly is available in the systems running in the organization. The data that is not available generally is the time required to perform an activity and services provided by the internal shared service departments.

Time to complete an activity - To find out the time required to complete the activity does not need ‘time and motion study’, as it is expected by the people. We can find out the time just by observing ourselves for couple of days. We can also point out the variation in the ‘standard time’, reasons and occurrence of the same. Most of the time the variations are there but they are not so frequent. If at all they are frequent we can define them separately.

Volume of activities by internal shared service departments – This is data is generally not required in any MIS and hence not collected. So here the inaccuracy is generally for the initial period of time. Once this data is regularly collected it is available with accuracy. For example, the volume of services provided by the Administration department.

The accuracy of the data can also be increased over a period of time and more importantly if it is required. But if ABC models are generally used for strategic decision making and here the 80% accuracy of the data is good enough. Most of the times the accurate data is not available only because, it is never collected in the fashion that is required by the ABC model. Mere regular collection of data increases the accuracy of the data.

I will give you an example of, how the accuracy of the data was increased in one of the implementations. This is an Insurance organization with a head quarter and lot of branches all over the country. There are multiple channels for acquiring the customer. Multiple processes in which, the policy can be issued like STP (straight through process), non STP non Medical and non STP Medical. Of course, various products to be sold. We started with taking all the branches as one location but calculated the cost of acquisition separately for each type of acquisition channel. This information was very useful for the organization in the initial stage. The next step was to calculate the costs of acquisition, serving, retention and closure product wise. Here we also separated the ‘rework’ from the ‘clean process’, for each of the process. We also found in this way that there are various processes that do not change across the channel or products.

We should not wait for implementing the ABC model just because we do not have the most accurate data with us. We should not also deny ourselves more accurate information just because we do not have the data in our hands today. Because the old saying makes perfect sense here that says, ‘Incremental progress is better than delayed, or unattained, perfection’.

Workshop on Activity Based Management at Pune, India

Indian industry, notwithstanding its growth projection, continues to face an uphill battle to identify the ‘real’ opportunities for growth amidst reduced consumer confidence and a customer population that is prone to churn and attrition. Many Indian enterprises, having invested heavily in good times are now finding it very difficult to sustain the cost structures with reduced margins. While the economic crisis will have serious impact on the growth and profitability of the companies, the crisis offers an excellent opportunity for companies to transform themselves towards long term profitable growth and increased stakeholder value. Not surprisingly several leading firms in India have started comprehensive transformation programs. The question though is – what should be the goal of such transformation programs? Should they focus on growth or profitability? Wouldn’t cutting costs offer immediate return of profits? Should more customers be acquired? Do more customer means more revenue and importantly more profits? While these are very common questions that the executives driving these transformation programs address, the reality behind these transformation programs is that often companies undertake these programs on “Gut feel” rather than basing them on “complete and consistent facts”.

To improve financial performance is a high priority in most organizations today. But to find accurate information on costs and profits for decision-making can be difficult. The problem is that traditional accounting systems were developed mainly for external reporting purposes. As a result, these systems often provide inaccurate and misleading information about costs and profitability. What you need is a system that will enable you to accurately measure costs and profitability for products, services, customers, and processes. It should also reveal the root causes of a certain cost or profitability level, enabling you to make the right decisions and take action to improve financial performance. What you need is Activity-Based Costing and Management. An unmatched concept that enables you to make better strategic and operational decisions to increase profitability, manage costs, and improve operational efficiency.

With ABC/M you can:
– Identify the most and least profitable products, services, customers, or sales Channels
– Accurately determine true costs for products and services
We are pleased to invite nominations from your organization for our One Day's Workshop on "Activity Based Management (ABM)". The details of the same are as under:

Date of Training Program - Saturday, 8th August, 2009.
Time - From 9:00 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.

Venue of the Workshop:
National Insurance Academy (NIA)
Opp. Chatrapati Shivaji Stedium, Balewadi,
Katraj - Dehu Road Bypass
Near Sadanand Resort
Pune-411045

Faculty:
Mr. Rajendra Patil

Who Should Attend the Workshop:
• CEOs, Senior as well as Middle Level professionals from Finance, Marketig, Costing, Operations, Sourcing who are keen to take their functional expertise to the next level.

• Note: This is not just a workshop but this can lead to Consultancy on ABM Projects. We assure that if you take ABM seriously and implement it, it will add to your bottom line in CRORES.

• Workshop Charges / Fees - (Includes Course Material, Break-fast, Tea-Coffee & Lunch)

Rs.4412 /- (inclusive of Service Tax) for 1 participant
Rs.4081/- (inclusive of Service Tax) per participant for 2 participants from the same organization.
Rs.3750 /- (inclusive of Service Tax) per participant for 3 or more participants from the same organization.

Payment to be made by cheque in the name of "Human Capital Consultants".

Ajay Walimbe
Director
Human Capital Consultants
A/16, Pradnyangad Apartment
Opp. Haripriya Hall
Navsha Maruti Mandir Lane
Off Tanaji Malusare Marg
Pune - 411 030
Tel: 020-66203576
Mobile: +91-9881060190

ajaywalimbe@vsnl.net

Deeper cost accounting v/s Activity Based Costing

Recently I met few professionals in India, who are the head of Management Accounting function of their respective organizations. This was in relation to selling my services of implementing Activity Based Costing (ABC) concept at their organization. Incidentally those were non-manufacturing organizations. While they were interested in understanding what ABC can do, at the very same time they also seemed to be convinced that ABC will not be any value addition to them. The primary reason they mentioned was, ABC is used for better allocation of the costs and we have designed our cost centers to such a detail that we need not do the allocation. We can find the cost centers directly for 90% of the expenses. Hence, there is no need to invest the time, money and other resources in ABC project. This is one of the reasons why professionals are saying ‘No’ to ABC in India. This made me think what could be the possible reasons behind this kind of thinking.

The costing has been used formally in manufacturing industry for a long time. The primary reason was to complete the Financial statement. The financial statement requires valuation of inventories (raw material, work-in-progress, finished goods etc.). This inventory valuation is generally considered with the costs up to the manufacturing stage. Eventually the same information was used for other management decisions like pricing. The post manufacturing costs were added and the organizations reached at a total cost of the product. With the good old days when price was cost plus margin, people added their expected margin and priced the product. Even in today’s business scenario professionals say the price is not always cost plus margin, but decided by the market, they use the ‘same cost’ for calculating the profitability of the product.

This has helped professionals believe that costing means ‘Product Costing’. Each and every unit of currency that is spent in the organization is linked to one or the other product that is produced and/or sold. Unfortunately the same logic has been used by the ‘Service Industry’ (banking, insurance etc.) when people started calculating the cost of the service (similar to the product in manufacturing industry). While doing this these professionals knew that there are no ‘labor hours’ or ‘machine hours’ available for taking the overheads to the services of the organization. In fact for service organizations almost every unit of currency spent is an overhead. Parallel to this the manufacturing organizations got a very important tool for automation the recording of their transaction, ‘the ERP’. Like all the other processes it also helped the management accountants to automate the basics of costing, that is ‘Cost center Accounting’. This automation helped them to manage more cost centers as well as booking of expenses to one or more cost centers at the source.

The ability to create, maintain more cost centers and identifying expenses to these cost centers at the source created a feeling that, if we can identify the expenses the source cost centre we can be more accurate in costing the product. To certain extent this is true also. These online transactional processing (OLTP) systems are now available for service industries like Banking, Insurance etc. That is when the ‘costing’ cells were created in these industries. The very difficulty of defining the product (for example we can calculate the cost of a television set, but how to calculate the cost of ‘Saving Account’ was an issue) probably led them to various options like identifying more cost centers.

I have already mentioned that, these professionals were interested in understanding about ABC, but they were trying to convince to themselves that ABC is no better (read as different) than the detail cost center accounting. Here in this post you will not find how ABC is different from traditional costing or Cost center accounting in detail way, but a comprehensive way of looking at costing model in any organization. More cost centers with more detailed information will not help a company decide whether or not to drop or add a product line, accept or reject new business, outsource business processes or bring others in-house, make a component or buy it, add a shift or work existing personnel overtime. They won’t help identify in-process movement and storage, order picking, or outside storage of raw materials as a major non-value adding issues. They won’t be able to tell you which customers or product lines are profitable and which are not. By itself, having “more cost centers” is entirely useless.

While talking on this subject to the veterans in this field, they put their views. One of the analogy that was used was the ‘Elephant and the seven blinds’. Anyone who honestly believes that “all they need are more cost centers” has a very narrow view of the impact cost information has on business decisions – they have only touched one elephant in one spot but now think they know everything there is to know about elephants.

An Economic Cost Model that Represents the Entire Elephant, by Doug Hicks

A valid economic cost model serves the needs of all interested parties in an organization. Such a model is an accurate representation of the company’s internal cost economics. By populating it with the appropriate data – data that will differ from one usage to another – a valid economic cost model will generate the accurate and relevant cost information required by all parts of the elephant. It will work whether the decision at hand is strategic or tactical. It will work whether the information needed is fully-absorbed or incremental. It will work using historical information or projected information. It will measure process costs, product costs, service costs, and customer costs. As shown in the Figure, it is the engine that takes the relevant data and processes it appropriately to provide support for management decisions and actions of all types.
Constructing a cost model based on only one blind man’s perception of an elephant is a terrible waste of a company’s resources. It solves only one problem, ignores all the others, and often adds many more. Until management accountants understand that a valid economic cost model of the entire organization is the key to providing management with the information it needs to survive and grow in an ever more competitive world, they will continue to “Rail on in utter ignorance of what each other mean, And prate about an Elephant not one of them has seen!” (DTH&Co. – Winter 2006 – Blind & Elephant).

Management accountants can perform an important role in the design of an ABC system. Based on their skills and training, they can help identify what is appropriate for analysis (product, customer, process, etc.) and explain the probable causes of an existing cost system’s deficiencies. In addition, based on their detailed knowledge of the information in their company’s costing information systems, they are uniquely qualified to judge the level of aggregation appropriate to the ABC costing system. They can use their understanding of costing methods to recommend appropriate methodologies for the assignment of costs to activities and cost objects. Finally, they will be able to use their understanding of the information and cost relationships to support the system once it is implemented. Gary_Cokins_SAS_IMA_on_Activity-Based_Costing

Activity Based Management results in Insurance Company

Across the insurance industry, management is under pressure to deliver the multiple objectives of Cost Reduction and Profitability. Generally there is a lack of information in the financial and management systems to properly inform and to target opportunities for improved costs. The complex business models, including issues around multi-channel and multi-product are not being supported by the traditional cost accounting. The speed with which the change is happening in today’s business area has taken on a particular force in the insurance industry due to increased competition, intervention of statutory bodies on pricing, and the advent of new technologies and distribution channels.

For the pricing of a policy the actuarial information provides the basic premium to that the organizational overheads are added ad-hoc. This is done primarily due to the unavailability of the relevant information. With the use of a relevant Activity Based Management (ABM) model the same organization can get information on acquiring a customer, serving the requests, claims and closure of policy due to surrender or maturity payment etc. Let us see how an ABM model can provide sufficiently detail information of the overheads. The model calculates the cost of various transactions (aka processes) in the organization. These transactions are grouped across various dimensions as follows:

Customer lifecycle event – Acquire, Serve, Retain and Close are the four events in the lifecycle of a customer with the organization. Various transactions are grouped as per these events, so that the organization can understand their ‘cost focus’ on acquisition, retention etc. The total cost to acquire in any period could vary between 35-45% of the total overhead. Retention costs take next place which include the renewals and revivals and can go up to 6-10% of the overhead. Cost to serve is around 2% and the cost to close including the claims, surrender, maturity etc. varies.

The ‘cost to serve’ the policyholder is one which should be kept as minimum as possible. This is the section where the policyholder can request a change of address, nominee, a switch in unit linked policy etc. Some of the requests are only because they are not properly handled at the time of acquisition. These can be grouped as region wise and channel wise, so that with a proper training or incentive it can be reduced. Some of the requests can be handled via internet.

Region – The cost information separated by region gives at least two type of information. The cost of same transaction like ‘sales call’ can be seen across the various regions. We can use the information for internal benchmarking. It also tells about the type of products that are sold, the type of post issuance requests across regions. With this information organization can run internal (for advisors) or external (for customers) campaigns to improve the performance of in the respective regions.

Channel – The insurance companies are using various channels for the selling of the policies. They have their attached advisors (tied agency) as the main channel. They are using the alternate channels of which Bank is most commonly used. The others could be from corporate agents to just sharing database. Once we separate the cost of transactions across the channels we can understand the effectiveness of various channels. The acquisition cost is different across various channels. This acquisition cost including the commission and the rework that is required due to incomplete documents etc. The quality of the customer can also be seen across the channels for their effectiveness.

Apart from the segregation of transaction channel wise, there are good amount of expenses made to manage the various channels. These expenses are typically for hierarchy of people within the channel, recruiting the advisors, training them, retaining them through various campaigns. The expenses should be first separated into one for recruitment and the other for retaining them. The effectiveness of the same can be analyzed after that. Around 50% of the overheads are spent on managing the channels. This is a very huge cost in any insurance organization.

Product Group – The primary grouping can be done according to the fund type like Participatory, non Participatory, Unit Linked, Pension etc. the further classification can be done if required. As the transactions are separated product wise it is very useful for the product development team to price the product appropriately.

Like channel dimension, there are various transactions for products and separate expenses which are directly attributable to the products like the collaterals, advertisements or campaigns etc. These expenses should not be taken as general overheads and include in the pricing.

Issuance Process – This is typically applicable for the acquisition and close events. In the acquisition event typically the processes could be a straight through process or non straight through process. A straight through process has certain guidelines decided and once the applicant falls within that no other information is required and it can be issued a policy. The advertisements that show that, people got a policy within few minutes on internet ‘online’ fall under this category. The other non straight through process requires underwriting and sometimes medical tests also. So it can be further separated as non medical and medical. We can find the expenses on various processes for issuance of policy and the same can be used for pricing of the product.

In case of claims it can be segregated as early claims and non early claims. The claims which are lodged within a year or two of the policy can have different expenses that the others. The patter can be seen channel wise and region wise so that fraudulent claim pattern can be found out.

Transactions – The various transactions (or processes) that are done can be primarily grouped as ‘Clean’ and ‘Rework’. The rework for the acquisition phase could be documents are not proper, medical test have to done again or different, policy that are not delivered, excess money refund etc. Like this we can separate the rework for each process and find out the costs of the same. This can be seen as around 1% of the total overhead and eating out your profitability.

Steps – For each transaction we can define various steps and the costs can be seen for each step within a transaction. For example in case of a clean process for issuance of new policy the steps could be sales call, receipt of documents, data entry, medical (if applicable), processing the request, issuance, dispatch, communication. The cost to serve can be defined as receipt of request, process, dispatch and communication. This helps in improving the process after looking at costs at various stages.

Apart from cost of performing transaction at various lifecycle events, cost to sustain the product and cost to sustain the channel, we have to segregate the overhead that has been used to build the capacity in the organization but not utilized (idle costs) and expenses on certain departments like finance (finalization section), internal audit, secretarial function which are not required by any product or customer but required to run the business or for statutory reporting purpose. We call this as ‘cost to sustain business’. This generally should not form the part of pricing, but it can change from organization to organization.

This type segregation of costs across various dimensions and the combination can help the organization in not only pricing of the product but also the improvement of the processes, improvement of the channel performance.