Customer
Overview
Customer (고객) refers to an individual or organization that consumes goods, services, or experiences provided by a company by paying consideration or through use. In modern management, customers are regarded not merely as sales targets but as core assets that determine a company's revenue structure, product development, and brand reputation. Therefore, the set of activities for acquiring, retaining, and growing customers (customer acquisition, retention, and expansion) forms the central axis of marketing and management strategy.
Main Content
Definition and Types of Customers
Customers are broadly divided into external customers and internal customers. External customers include consumers who purchase products (B2C), corporate purchasing managers (B2B), and distribution partners, while internal customers refer to colleague departments that take over the next stage of work within an organization. Depending on the purchase stage, they are also classified as potential customers (Lead/Prospect), new customers, repeat-purchase customers, and churned customers (Churn); the user is also often separate from the payer (e.g., a parent pays and a child uses). Defining the scope of customers accurately in this way is the starting point of customer strategy.
Customer Value and Lifetime Value
Companies evaluate customers from the perspective of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). CLV is the present value of net profit expected to be generated by a customer over the relationship period, and marketing efficiency is judged by its ratio to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) (LTV/CAC). It is generally known that the cost of acquiring a new customer is more than five times the cost of retaining an existing customer, so improving retention has a large impact on profitability. The concept of Customer Equity extends this to the perspective of managing the value of the entire customer base as a financial asset.
Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
Customer satisfaction is measured by the gap between expectations and actual experience, and representative indicators include CSAT (satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Score), and CES (Customer Effort Score). Satisfaction is a necessary but not sufficient condition for loyalty; habit, switching costs, and emotional attachment also play a role. Loyal customers have high repurchase rates and low price sensitivity, and they lower acquisition costs through referrals. On the other hand, because most dissatisfied customers quietly churn without complaining, designing channels that encourage complaint submissions is important.
Customer Journey and Experience Management
The customer journey (Customer Journey) consists of the stages awareness → consideration → purchase → use → repurchase → recommendation, and customer experience management (CXM) is the activity of eliminating pain points that arise at touchpoints in each stage. The omnichannel strategy, in which online, offline, app, and service channels are connected into one consistent experience, has become standard especially in retail and finance. Service blueprints, design thinking, and persona-based design are representative customer-centric design methodologies.
Customer Relationship Management and Data
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a system that integrates customer data and systematizes acquisition, retention, and expansion activities. Recently, CDP (Customer Data Platform), which integrates customer data from various sources separately from CRM, has been combined to support real-time segmentation and personalization. Customers are segmented through RFM analysis (recency, frequency, monetary value) or cohort analysis, and a closed-loop process that collects VOC (Voice of Customer) and reflects it in product improvement is emphasized.
Customer-Centric Management
Customer-centric management refers to aligning an organization's KPIs and decision-making structure with customer value. Customer retention rate, NPS, CLV, and other metrics are managed alongside financial indicators, and an increasing number of companies link customer metrics to executive compensation.
Latest Trends
The biggest change in 2024–2025 is generative AI-based customer service. As AI agents and assistants handle not only simple inquiries but also order changes, refunds, and recommendations, the cost structure of customer service is changing, and designing human-AI collaboration for service quality has emerged as a new challenge. At the same time, with the strengthening of cookie-less and privacy regulations, the value of first-party data and zero-party data voluntarily provided by customers has grown. Balancing regulatory compliance—such as GDPR, CCPA, and Korea's Personal Information Protection Act—with personalization has become important.
The center of gravity in growth strategy has also shifted from new acquisition to retention and expansion (Expansion). With the spread of the subscription economy, churn management and upsell/cross-sell metrics have become key KPIs, and superfan marketing using communities and fandoms, real-time personalization engines, and AI-based automated VOC classification are becoming mainstream. Ethical standards and requirements for explainability in handling customer data are also being strengthened.
Related Topics
- [[Marketing]]
- [[CRM]]
- [[Customer Experience]]
- [[Subscription Economy]]
- [[Privacy]]