How To Maximise Your Customer Relationships – 4 ‘Take Aways’!

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Chinese studentsAre you maximising your marketing efforts and your customer relationships? Do you find, attract and keep the customers that you want, and do you maximise the opportunities and the profits that they can deliver? Our research suggests 3D Businesses identify and understand what their customers really want, what they like and what they don’t like. They also tailor their offer to their different customers to ensure that they give them what they want!

Too many businesses don’t really understand their different customers’ needs, or even worse, treat them all the same! The result can often be missed opportunities and ultimately, the loss of those customers.

Here’s a great example of an organisation that took some time out to really investigate what a particular group of their customers thought and wanted and tailored their offer accordingly.

Almost 90,000 students from China are studying at UK universities and make up 20% of the overseas students here, with some paying up to £30,000 for a course every year. In total, overseas students’ tuition generate almost £4 billion annually and those customers are clearly valuable to our universities. It makes sense therefore to ensure that they get what they want!

However, after a fact-finding mission to China by The University Catering Organisation (TUCO) which provides food for 340 universities and colleges across the UK, they found that Chinese students are potentially being put off studying in Britain because of the food served in our universities. They identified that for many Chinese students, what they eat is a central cultural issue and sandwiches just don’t cut it!

“Eating and drinking is a huge aspect of their life,” explained Matt White, Director of TUCO, By talking to their peers that are here in the UK, prospective Chinese students will understand life isn’t so scary here, there is some comfort in food… and that’s a really important aspect to a prospective student.”

TUCO have therefore responded to their Chinese customers’ view of British cuisine, and are changing their menus and adding more authentic foods that will appeal to their Chinese customers. They are also ditching their charge for chopsticks!

Our research shows that 3D Businesses have a real customer focus in everything they do – they also ensure that that focus is on the right customers – we call it ‘Choose ‘em or Lose ‘em’! How do you measure up when it comes to customer focus?

So, here are some ‘Take Aways’ for you to make it work!

First of all Take Away 1: Some questions for you….

  • How well do you ‘segment’ your customers?
  • How good an understanding do you have of their different likes, dislikes and needs?
  • Where are the ‘blockages’ and ‘barriers’ that prevent some of your customers spending (more) with you?
  • Are there opportunities that you are missing out on?
  • How can you find out?

Takeaway 2: Take some time out to analyse your customers – Ask yourself:

  • Are we focusing our efforts and resources on the right sort of customers?
  • Who are those customers?
  • Do we know what they want and think?
  • What do we need to do to maximise opportunities with those customers?

Takeaway 3: Focus your efforts on the people that count – your customers! Ask them some questions – Try these as a starter for 10:

  • Why do you buy for us?10 D's Of Customers
  • When do you buy from us? 
  • What do we do that irritates or annoys you?
  • What should we never stop doing?
  • What don’t we do that we should?
  • Are there any other products and services that we should be offering?
  • How could we do more business? 

Takeaway 4: A FREE E-BOOK!

We’ve produced a FREE e-book that helps you evaluate your approach to your customers called The 10 D’s Of Different Customers. It provides you with some simple templates to help you ’segment’ and target your customers and crucially, focus your efforts and resources on the right ones accordingly!

By painting pictures of 10 Different customer types, it’s an opportunity for you to take a bit of time out, evaluate and identify your customers and your approach to them….

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Andy Hanselman
Hi there! I help businesses and their people create competitive advantage by 'Thinking in 3D'! That means being 'Dramatically and Demonstrably Different'! I research, speak about, write about and work with businesses to help them maximise their sales and marketing, their customer service and their customer relationships.

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