Business success depends on one thing more than anything else and that is developing profitable customer relationships. There are two sides to those relationship, your understanding of your customers and their perception of you. In this post I am interested to think about the way that you understand your customers.
The whole point of having a business is to have customers and it’s very easy to get carried away with having lots of customers but if you don’t know what those customers are achieving for you they could turn out to be very expensive.
Of course we aren’t interested in psychoanalysing our customers, we don’t need to know about the events in their childhood that shaped their attitudes, rather we are interested to understand the effect that they have on our business.
Some of the things that you should be looking to understand better are:
- who your customers are
- where your customers are
- what they buy
- how often they buy
- your customer acquisition cost
- your total customer value
This list is limited because at this stage we are only interested in what you know about your customers and you should have this information in your database if you have one, if you don’t have a database you should be able to extract it from your accounting systems.
This is all really important knowledge, once you have it you can use it to inform your targeting, your product development, your messaging and your marketing budgets.
What we are not interested in here is what your customers think of us because to understand that we would need to ask them and that is customer satisfaction which we will be tackling next week.
So come back next week if you don’t have a blogging clue about customer satisfaction.
