How to know if you’re sitting pretty with customers
May 29th, 2009
* 2 votes
We spend a lot of time, appropriately, sharing as much as we can at StartupNation about how to get new customers. But once you get customers onboard, what can you do to make sure you keep them?
Our advice is to ask four key questions:
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Who is my customer? This helps you understand your target market. Familiarize yourself with customers’ needs and wants through personal interactions, by studying their buying patterns, by reviewing market research studies, etc.
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What do I do for them? Defining exactly what you do for customers will help you focus in on exactly what your offering is. To be clear, this should be a definition of what you believe—not what your customer believes—you do for them.
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How well do I do it? How well you do it then begins to factor in what your customer believes. If you have trouble quickly characterizing customer satisfaction, that’s a sure sign that you’ve got to focus more on your customers.
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How do I know how well I’m doing it? Lastly, answering this question is all about having measurement tools in place. Do you request customer feedback through online forms or insert cards with a survey question or two? Do you make yourself personally available to customers to get a first-hand feel for their views?
If you can answer these four simple questions with confidence, you’re in good shape. If not, you’ve got work to do. To retain customers, you should ask yourself these four questions every month to make sure you’re staying tuned in and on track.
June 1st, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Very good, Rich. Re the point about measuring: For what we do it is impossilbe to ojectively measure the very subjective service we offer (processing messages as a telephone answering service). So, we use the number of customer complaints as measurement. Our stats come out well so we advertise them in all of our marketing tools: For example, “From January thru March 2009 we had one error per 8,558 message transactions.”
September 3rd, 2009 at 11:52 am
Rich - good points about working to retain customers after you attract them. Customer loyalty can add money to the bottom line or take it away.
I have developed an online tool (on my website) to show business people the value of customer loyalty in their specific business. One business owner emailed me his data which showed a 10% increase in customer loyalty produced a 29% increase in profits. Wow! Not a bad way to beef up the bottom line!
Thanks for the post!
KS