Our definition: Customer closeness is an active measure of your awareness and alignment to your customer’s needs and values.
Gosh, there are probably too many benefits to list out here! Understanding what makes your current and prospective customers tick allows you to tailor brands, products, pricing and communication to specific groups, so you can make best use of your resources. What’s more according to Forbes “customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.” Need we say more?
Your first step towards customer closeness is to break them down into more manageable groups. Segmentation is all about finding commonalities and shared characteristics within your target market so you can better acquire, keep and grow them as customers. By layering up different data you can quickly understand; who your customers are, how they’ve interacted with your brand and why they are buying from you.
For most brands getting closer to their customer means they need to change. That also means they need to measure that change. Most often when we think about metrics in connection to our customers we think about things like: average lifetime value of segments, average churn rates and annual customer satisfaction surveys. Yes, these are all useful BUT they only tell you yesterday’s weather once you’re wet. If you want to understand why customers did what they did, you need to think about brand perception, brand tracking, competitor analysis as well as digging into how wider factors are affecting your industry and your brand.
So, it might be a bit obvious, but the ultimate goal of understanding your customer is to serve them better. After all, they aren’t going to love you if you don’t show them a little love first. There will always be a bit of a trade-off between what a customer ideally wants and what you can deliver. If you truly understand your customers and their values though, it becomes a whole lot easier to create processes and procedures that serve them more efficiently.
