The Customer Driven Business - An Introduction
It’s a fairly obvious statement – every business has customers. Without customers, there is no business. Knowing who your customers are and what they want from your business is an obvious requirement for all businesses and yet so many really don’t have much idea about either in anything other than surface detail. A successful business will build its business strategy around the customers that it wishes to service. It will know the products and services that will appeal to particular customer segments, and it will know how, and when, to reach out to those people in a targeted, personalised fashion. Surveys such that 90% of customers will remain loyal to a business that respects their needs, desires and privacy – and that communicates with them when appropriate and relevant. No-one wants to miss out on an essential piece of information (the pre sale date, the product launch information, etc) and no-one wants to be over communicated with. The challenge for the smart business is to get that essential balance right and that can only happen if you truly understand your customer.
Customer intelligence – the foundation of a successful customer driven business strategy – comes from many sources. These will include customer provided profile information (demographic and geographical profiles, for example), transaction histories (what they have purchased or done, when and how) and solicited customer feedback (tell us what we can do for you). Many larger organisations have introduced loyalty and membership schemes in a bid to understand more about their customers. Such schemes provide a wealth of data that can then be analysed – at a cost - in order to identify particular customer groupings and product/service alignments. Other organisations have regular customer feedback initiatives in place that allow the customer to tell the organisation what they would like to hear about, when and in what format.
A loyal customer base is essential to the successful business – a satisfied customer is 5 times more likely to purchase from you again than a first time customer. A study by RJMetrics found that loyal customers that purchase from you frequently are much more profitable than your average customer. Research found that your loyal top 10% spend 3x more per order than the lower 90%, and your top 1% of customers spend 5x more than the lower 99%. So knowing your customer is an essential business knowledge set.
At SixtyToForty, we have been helping businesses of all shapes and sizes to understand their target customer base for many years. We understand the business, cultural and technical challenges that introducing true customer centricity involves, and we have a tried and tested roadmap for overcoming these challenges and being able to exploit the many opportunities that customer centricity brings. We can help you to build out your strategy, get closer to your customers, and to utilise technology to maximum effect in engaging with your customers on their terms.
