Christian Taylor, Yell’s customer strategy director

Having a customer strategy is simply good customer service amplified. But how can it increase profits? Christian Taylor, Yell’s Customer Strategy Director, explains how a customer strategy is about providing good customer service – profitably.

The success of your business relies on how well you know your customers’ needs. Any business wishing to succeed needs to be ‘customer centric’, this purely means having a customer strategy in place. Regardless if you’re a fledging start-up or large corporate, being customer centric is vital. It comes down to being aware of the level of competition that exists between you and your competitors, and how differentiated your products and services are.

Invest time in your customers
The ‘value exchange’ is about investing time in understanding your customers so you can in turn try to help them win. Business innovation doesn’t end with product development. Any business has to be innovative in how it protects future profit by being creative in ‘engineering’ profit certainty into the operating model.  To do this successfully means you have to think carefully about how your customers perceive the value you are offering and how they will do so in the future.

Create your own chart
* When you get a moment write down the components of value which describe your products, service or solution. Put these on a vertical axis of a simple chart
* Along the bottom write down 1 to 10 for each value component along the vertical access, and then score yourself out of 10
* Connect up the dots, and then do the same for your competition
You should end up with a few vertical ‘squiggly’ lines – one representing your business the others your competitors
* Ask yourself what your customers want more of, and what do they want less of
* Move the scores around for your business so that you have a new representation of your business. Is this what your future business looks like?
* Then from assessing the new line versus the old line for your business, try to identify new components of value. For example, what do your customers want which they don’t even know they need yet.

To give you an idea of what I mean, think back to the 90s and in particular to a company called Burmah Castrol. In the mid 90s by adopting this process Castrol came up with their premium brand -  Magnatec – today we all ‘install’ engine oil inside our cars which ‘sticks’ to the inside of the engine cylinders during cold starting.  Those clever people at Castrol invented a new need and in doing so gained significant market share.

Cultivating customer loyalty
A good customer strategy extends even wider and helps to ensure future profit through customer management. Customer management is another key part of any customer strategy. It is about treating customers as individuals based on the knowledge gained about them. It means remembering and storing onto databases what they have told you and then interpreting using analytical techniques what would be the best way to help them the next time you speak to them. 

If you only have a few customers this is relatively easy but the larger you are the more difficult it is.  As your business grows, customer management will become a key part of your customer strategy.  Knowing exactly what your customers want and then delivering this is a very powerful way of keeping your customers loyal.  The more loyal they are, the better you know them.  This becomes a virtuous circle after a while, resulting in greater revenue and profit.

The rise of social media must also be a key part of your customer strategy – in understanding what your customers really think about you.  Organisations like Facebook, Trip Adviser and Yell’s very own Trusted Places are the new ‘word of mouth’. By staying close and in tune with what your customers think you can also identify the new needs – referred to earlier.

A customer strategy is therefore more than offering good service. It’s everything you do to with how you manage your customers better and more profitably

Tags: customer service, customer strategy, making profit