Customeyes and their customers..
We do practice what we preach and on a regular basis we make sure that we find out what are clients really think about us.
The feed back is always illuminating and often not for the right reasons.Having said that we have never lost a client because we have let them down it’s always for a reason beyond anyones control.
Clients have come to expect that we can provide results and that we can translate research findings into good business direction. To help this we use our own simple metric to group customers into easily understood categories. These are by no means hard and fast and are designed to offer broad guidelines on what type of customers our clients have nad hence inform resource allocation.
These categories areas follows and are designed to illustrate the customers desire to help you achieve more success.
Generators representing the ideal.They are brand,company evangelists and are your flag wavers.
They outspend other customers, are more likely to try new product offerings and of most importance they promote your brand.The oft quoted research that says it costs more to recruit new customers than hang on to existing ones is the reason why this group is so central to success.
Resistors, the bunch of customers that you don’t want to waste marketing budgets on..
They may well switch their allegiance to another company becoming someone else’s problem.They generally are a problem in so much as they are more at loggerheads with your efforts than in line with them.As a group they spend money with you but they take out of the company at the same time. They command a higher proportion of your resources to keep them happy and its a resource that could be directed towards Generators and Acceptors.
The issue is that whilst still complaining as your customer they are not only draining your resources in having to deal with them, staff time etc, they are a negative PR campaign that is impossible to control. Should there be a few of these campaigns going on at the same time then reputation and standing in the market can take a potential knock.
What of the middle ground, the Acceptors? These are the customers that have mixed experiences and the ones that haven’t quite decided where they should put their cross. These are the very customers that every business should be attending to so that they are gently pointed towards the Generators and become your Brand Evangelists.
So what does our feed back tell us?
To be honest we have our fair share of all the above with a couple of Resistors in there as well….
Our Generators do just that, they promote our services to others where possible.
The Acceptors are to be honest moving towards being Generators but they ain’t there yet…
What did surprise us is that some of our lapsed( we don’t call them lost,there’s always hope…)customers turn out to be Generators…How can that be I hear you ask?
Market circumstances have meant that a couple of clients are standing back from undertaking any new market research but will return to it early next year. Despite the fact that they are lapsed clients they are still actively referring our services to other companies.We have had some very promising conversations with contacts they have supplied.
That is the crux of this – lapsed clients are a source of potential business as they still hold your company in high regard. They will continue to promote your services and should be contacted on a regular basis.
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