Unlocking customer accounting’s potential: a service-dominant logic approach

Purpose - This paper aims to problematise critiques raised against customer accounting’s numeric focus, which risks controlling and simplifying customers rather than facilitating closer engagement. This analysis suggests ways to better account for what it is that customers buy, why they do so and how to better serve them. Design/methodology/approach - Service-dominant logic (SDL) is a marketing ideology that recognises the active role of customers in value creation. Seven customer accounting techniques are appraised against SDL principles to identify strengths and shortfalls in logic and application. Findings - Customer accounting techniques align with SDL’s beneficiary-oriented and relational view of customers. Weaker alignment is found regarding a focus on outputs rather than outcomes, silence about the customer’s role in co-creating value and failure to recognise contextual circumstances. Research limitations/implications - The analysis uses prototypical descriptions of customer accounting techniques. Actual applications could offset weaknesses or raise other shortfalls. Practical implications - For each area of SDL, the authors suggest avenues for integrating SDL into customer accounting using related literature and building on concepts within customer accounting techniques. Originality/value - SDL contrasts with the traditional, goods-dominant logic that underscores much of accounting. SDL is used to critically and constructively evaluate customer accounting techniques.