ROC? Customers as shareholders?

Maybe a more accurate measure of ROI a company is getting is not how much revenue their advertising/marketing/branding averages but how much revenue the value perceived by their current customers produces. 

What I mean by that is do their current customers, of their own free will, not for any gift cards or contests, tell other people to use that broker/company. 

But, until we can measure negative ROI, essentially the annoyance, useless clicks to delete, clogging of any social media feeds, etc. positive ROI just cannot be that relevant of a stat.

Maybe ROC(return on customers) may be the better measure. 

Related but different? If it's available, do you own stock in the company providing your insurance? Mine isn't publicly traded yet.

But I was writing about retention a week or so ago. There is validity to maintaining a customer and quite a bit of relevant math to support why it makes sense to keep customers. But, in lieu of the abuse and laziness from both carriers and their distributors(agents/brokers), I'm curious about other ways to measure this and increase revenue, based around this.  The "Return On Customer," isn't as simple as the policies they have or the revenue those policies produce. Why? Because there isn't currently a great way to assess the time and expense of servicing. So, you also have to factor in additional revenue like a referred business that came as a result of the expense associated with the initial sale, supplemental sales, and servicing. This is, of course, a challenge so I have long thought that if you averaged about .5 referrals per household/business you have insured, that is very good. For example; you have 200 customers, you receive 100 referrals this year.  *Liminted data since this is against my own personal measurement which is imperfect

But then I was wondering, how do you account for the other 100 who did not refer you, someone? There are a variety of reasons for this which is why not getting referrals from everyone is not a completely terrible thing. So, the question is, how many of your customers would spend additional money to buy shares in your company. And along those lines, if each policy with your company came with a share in your company, would this additional value be perceived as value? 

I was listening To Daniel Schreiber and while dancing around the topic of an IPO he did say something to the effect of having an IPO earlier in a company's lifecycle so people can experience more of the upside

So I wonder, if their, or any new entrants(Clearcover, Hippo, Metromile, Root, etc) could offer shares to policyholders would they buy? Do they believe in the company that much?

Can we correlate an individual's willingness to share a product/service with their willingness to risk available capital to further support a company they already support with purchases? 

*although I find the tie of charitable giving and behavior interesting, it's as weak as profit sharing that agents receive, control the controllable*

The question then becomes how do you combine the 2 in a relevant and meaningful way?

How many Allstate, Travelers, etc. customers have shares of their stock? How many Lemonade customers would willingly buy a piece of that company? Enough to negate the need for an IPO, that is intended to raise funds as opposed to cash out founders. Not just because of their volume of customers, but due to the value these customers perceive in this entity

Within insurance, specifically, the agent and broker channel that I'm most familiar with, the prevailing ownership and compensation structures are partially to blame for the talent drain we have. In theory, the world of tech maintains employees, in part, due to them receiving shares in the company they are building. How can this translate down to a two to 20ish person company?

Just some ongoing thoughts that needed to leave my brain. The negative of advertising is not discussed, because we are too busy killing each other with it.