Return on Customer: A Revolutionary Way to Measure and Strengthen Your Business.

Return on Customer: A Revolutionary Way to Measure and Strengthen Your Business. By Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. Currency/Doubleday, 296 pages. $24.95.

Return on customer (ROC) can be expressed as a mathematical equation, but to the authors, it's a measure of value creation--and a key metric to drive decisions about a host of business issues, including financial reporting and business combinations.

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Authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, founders of an eponymous consulting group, have been expounding on the value of consumer focus for years. In the process, they've written a number of books, many with a "one to one" theme in the title. This book is perhaps a bit more technical, but a central message is tied back to a far more basic, and catchy, premise: "Without customers, you don't have a business. You have a hobby."

Peppers and Rogers don't minimize the difficulty of serving customers, which, they write, "are even scarcer than capital." The idea, they say, is to not only get more of them, but to grow their connection with you, make them more profitable and serve them more efficiently.

Not surprisingly, the authors conclude that too many companies take a short-term view of customer relationships--the "sell them as much as I can today" theory, rather than the notion of nurturing them and building future value. The value proposition then becomes the company's, not the customer's.

A series of appendices and nearly 60 pages of notes and index material seem a bit like detail overload. But the book uses good examples from companies like Citigroup, AOL and BMW, and is authoritatively written and intellectually provocative, which makes for a good return on the reader's time.