When you identify your customer groups you improve your customer experience

Loyal customers help grow your business, and that loyalty comes when customers have a winning experience with your business.

It sounds simple, but in this highly competitive, social media-saturated business world, it’s hard to stand out from your competition and to be the business that your customer chooses, again and again.

To ensure you deliver a great customer experience, you have to be able to identify who your customers are and how they differ from each other.

It would be surprising if you only served one customer group.

For example, a city restaurant at lunchtime will host tourists, business people and regular local visitors. To deliver a great customer experience, a different approach is needed for each group. A approach which is too general could easily alienate one of your customer groups.

With your team, identify your business’s customer groups. Keep it to 2 or 3 so that it’s easy to manage. Then go through those groups and look at what each one values about your business, products or services.

In the case of the city restaurant, this may be the price of the food, the quality of the setting or the presentation. Business guests may want fast service, but tourists want to relax and are in no rush.

According to Matt Watkinson in his book, The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences, these customer values show up at 3 different levels.

• Brand Level – Brand Value – What is the value of your product or service in relation to other similar products or services? For example, Coca-Cola sold a record 150 million cans of Coke in 2019 just by adding first names to the cans, even though their use in relation to other fizzy drinks is exactly the same.
• Product/Service Level – Economic Value – What does your product cost, in relation to market value and to other similar products? This level of value is about how your product or service delivers on your customers’ overall objective.
• Interaction Level – Use Value – This relates to the function or utility of an object – a pen writes, a record player plays music.

With your team, have a good look at your customer groups and use the ‘levels of customer value’ questions to help you determine how you can provide the best customer experience. You can find these by clicking the support tools link within this Business Breakthrough report.