Customer lifetime value : the path to profitability

This survey talks about Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) as a metric that would help managers make informed business decisions. While there have been prior articles that take an extensive and in-depth look at Customer Equity (CE) (Villanueva and Hanssens, 2007), this survey reviews the CLV metric in particular. The definition and approaches to compute CLV and the concept of customer equity are discussed in detail. Specifically, this survey provides methods for measuring CLV, the strategies for developing customer-centric strategies, the implementation of CLV strategies in a B2B and B2C setting, and the challenges faced by an organization in implementing a CLV-based framework. This survey details the importance of CLV as a metric in a marketer's toolkit and how it is relevant to managing customers.