Reactivate (repeat win)
If you find that a
customer on your file no longer does business with you, maybe you
should try to reactivate them. The ability to try to reactivate/win
back lapsed customers assumes that you have systems that actually
monitor customer’s activity or inactivity. The whole idea of
investing in customer knowledge indicators is to create a base of
trusted information on which you to make decisions. Reactivation can
only be achieved if you have the relevant measures and customer
understanding on hand. Think of lapsed customers as those that you
could win back if you have the right value proposition and their
attitude to you is not negative.
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Retention (keep)
Customer retention is
one of the best ways of ensuring the survival of an organisation.
However, hand in hand with the recognition of the need for customer
retention is the need for customer analytics. What does the customer
value about the way you treat them or supply a service? What value
for money do they receive? A customer knowledge indicator must be
built to identify the customers you actually have, the customers you
want to retain and what they actually value. If the 80/20 (or 70/30)
rule applies, then retaining the wrong customers will help destroy a
company’s profit very quickly.
If retention is
important and identifying the right customers is one of the most
important things a company can do, why is it that not all companies
are doing this? Well without customer knowledge it may be almost
impossible to identify your customers in any unique fashion let
alone calculate some metric regarding their short or long-term
value. This may be one of the reasons companies have been pouring
money into call centres as a means of servicing their customers and
"doing CRM" rather than the really tough alternative of actually
addressing the real need for a corporate CRM policy and customer
knowledge.
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Cross-Sell (develop)
The desire to sell more
products/services to existing customers has been an extremely
successful way for many to grow their business. Over the last few
years, many mergers and acquisitions have been founded on the
concept of cross-sell. However, merely saying you will cross-sell
does not make it happen. Successful cross-selling is based on
extensive customer knowledge and many organisations have found
significant cost savings in their use of customer data. They have
reduced their cost of sale and also their cost of customer
acquisition.
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Up-Sell (develop)
The idea is to help your
existing customers perceive the worth (sell) of a higher value
product/service than the one they currently have. Very simply you
move someone from one product to another of higher value. By moving
your customers up through your range of services (and products) with
different margins and bundles can benefit both parties. Over the
lifetime of a customer, they may move from one income band to
another and their needs, desires and ability to pay will change. The
fact you can predict behaviour through the use of customer data, the
knowledge that can be extracted from this with the right tools, and
human interaction is a means of improving the bottom line. To be
successful requires the organisation to focus on customer behaviours
and life-cycle patterns. Most successful up-sell models are based on
providing real value to the customers and also form part of any
organisation’s retention strategy.
Migration
is an extension to
Up-Sell.
Migration strategies should be considered where you wish to promote
a new version of a product your customer previously purchased.
Life-cycle also comes into play and can be used to determine the
best timing to suggest an offer to migrate to a replacement model,
take a software upgrade, switch to a replacement service package,
etc.
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Acquisition (win)
In many respects,
acquisition has always been the way companies built their business.
Without acquiring customers, you don’t have any to retain. The many
voices that talk about acquisition in the past tense seem to have
forgotten the basis of all business - you need to acquire the right
new customers and retain the right existing customers. In some
industries where there are few suppliers, you may already have some
kind of relationship with 99 percent of the market, but there are
always other markets and other niches for the creative.
Acquiring the right
customers for those that have customer knowledge indicators is a
task of identification. By identifying the profile of your most
valuable customers and those with the greatest future value
potential, you can recruit more that share their profile. If you
don’t have customer knowledge indicators and functioning CRM
philosophy, it is more hit and miss. Market research helps but is
not sufficient. Organisations that have invested in a customer
knowledge targeting system have a built-in advantage and unique
differentiator over their competitors - the information they have
collected, collated and mined on their existing customers!
Remember that there are
number of alternative channels for the potential customer to buy
your goods, and some may involve the choice to interact with a real
human being. To attract the right customers; use the information you
have. Often as not, what a customer did yesterday, he is likely to
do today - so find more that will act like him.
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Experience
(reason)
Any and all customer
experiences can and do create both positive and negative feelings.
We live for experiences that are positive and try to avoid the
negative. Our experience of a service or a product is intrinsically
bound up with how we value the relationship, the transaction and our
perceptions of the company we are interacting with. If perception is
reality then the customer experience leads one to comment, "I will
see it when I believe it." The customer experience is all. If a
customer has a bad experience, they might give you a little more
rope, but the experience is remembered. For example, when something
good happens you tell three or four people and when something bad
happens you tell 12 or more.
The customer experience
must be something the organisation invests in - both at senior
management level and throughout the organisation. In some instances
one bad experience is enough to drive a customer away. Modelling
your good customers then treating them badly is a recipe for
disaster.
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Technologies4Targeting Ltd.,
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