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Preface The concept of lifetime value is well founded in the sales and marketing field, where there has been a growing appreciation that it is cheaper and more profitable to maintain than gain and that a business needs to think over the long term regarding its customer relationships, rather than take a narrow, single transaction perspective. HP’s David Packard famously once stated that “marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department” implying that all employees are part-time marketers and so those in operations and service delivery also need to grasp the lifetime value concept and ensure that they play a role in nurturing customer relationships, so as to maximise both the return for the company and the value received by the customer. This article first appeared on tenfold