Customer Value Principles

Sustainable growth doesn’t come from buying customers or squeezing short-term gains. It comes from treating the customer base as a core asset and managing it with discipline. These principles are a practical code for leaders who want to grow by earning loyalty.

The Six Principles

• Measure: Make the value of your customer base visible with clear, standardized metrics.

• Align: Organize leaders, incentives, and systems to grow customer value.

• Relate: Build trust by engaging customers, employees, investors, and partners with clarity and fairness.

• Keep: Deliver so much value that customers and stakeholders choose to stay with you.

• Earn: Earn growth through loyalty and advocacy—never by exploiting relationships or buying short-term gains.

• Yield: Create durable economic value by acquiring the right customers, controlling costs, and deepening relationships with discipline.

The Customer Value Principles define how enduring companies behave. They make customer value measurable, actionable, and central to leadership. They provide the system and discipline to ensure that growth is truly earned and that loyalty translates into financial performance.

Change the system, not just the metrics and incentives

I help leaders build the systems that make that happen. I didn’t set out to become an expert on customer loyalty. But three early career experiences set me on that path.

I learned from my grandfather’s small business how loyalty built on trust can create lasting advantage. I saw at LEXIS/NEXIS how competitors who invested in customer relationships reshaped market share. I witnessed firsthand how corporate systems that ignored customer value could erode it, even when my clients’ teams met their internal targets.

My mission: Make customer value the currency of business success.

I have long pondered why well-intentioned, brilliant leaders with successful track records so often dismantle the initiatives, investments, processes, technology, and people that earn customer loyalty, There are dozens of factors, but the most important determinant of why they choose to exploit relationships and undermine loyalty is quite simple: Our accounting and management reporting systems fail to supply reliable, fine-grained views of the customer behaviors that drive economic value. As a result, they simply lack visibility into the impact their decisions have on customer relationships.

What I do

That is why I am devoted to helping CEOs, boards, and leadership teams redesign their organizations to build and sustain customer value. I help them:

• Learn how to design their products, services, and operations around the customers they can serve best

• Measure and manage the value they deliver, the health of customer relationships, and the value they earn in return

• Ensure they set their organization on a path to sustainable, profitable, organic growth

• Foster an energetic, enthusiastic, and creative workforce inspired by a customer-focused purpose

Companies that create true value should earn both fervent customer advocacy and enthusiastic investor support.

My background

I am the creator of the Net Promoter System, co-author of The Ultimate Question 2.0, and a longtime Bain partner who founded and led the global Customer Strategy practice. I now teach at Harvard Business School, serve on several nonprofit and corporate boards, and host the Customer Confidential podcast, where I explore how leaders build customer‑centric businesses.