By Tony Samson
MARKETING practitioners consider repeat business an important measure of corporate success, as it demonstrates “stickiness” with the customer. A good retention program to keep customers from leaving is seen as more cost-effective than trying to win new ones. This is why customer complaints are taken very seriously, if they manage to reach the intended manager, and not shredded at the first stop.
The concept of business development is no longer limited to winning new clients every time. It now includes efforts to deepen existing client relationships by offering more value to the same customer. Pitching incessantly for new business is seen as a costly strategy that sucks in precious executive talent.
In the pursuit of repeat business from existing customers, the front liners are trained to remember the regular patron and his habits sometimes with the aid of data from previous encounters. The reception (please wait to be seated) guides him to his preferred table and the waiter remembers his favorite dish and how it should be prepared. (Caesar salad with chicken, dressing on the side, Sir?)
A patronage algorithm tracks the pattern of e-books previously purchased, including titles and authors that have been browsed, and then e-mailing the tracked customer with new titles that follow his literary tastes. (You can pre-order the new Stephen King novel coming out in three months.) Also, previous orders reveal preferred genres (mysteries and thrillers) and open up pitches for new authors and recent releases in this category.
Hotels with good information systems understand their customer — king size bed again, Sir in a non-smoking floor? They may even leave a menu of the dine-in preferences — you just have to call room service and say “the usual.” And of course, breakfast buffet for two.
Not all businesses expect customers to keep coming back. Those that avoid repeat business from the same customer include hospitals, car repair shops, and funeral parlors. But even these organizations still use satisfied customers for word-of-mouth marketing to build their brand as reliable service providers. Here, frequent patronage may indicate an inability to immediately provide good solutions that work for a long time. Funeral parlors don’t even have to remember names and faces — it must be the makeup.
Still, even satisfied customers sometimes want variety. It’s not a failure of attention and care when a regular customer wants a change of scenery. Also, it can be creepy when the service provider is overly familiar with what you’re going to say before you open your mouth — a body scrub again, Sir? Too high a level of familiarity can strike the customer as presumptuous.
There is always the urge for something different or novel that requires marketing to offer variety in-house to the same customer. (Sir, would you like to try nibbling fish for your toes this time?) Companies can approach their service like a food court where different cuisines can be tried. Even the old all-you-can-eat buffet table has given way to kiosks with different offerings in a big hall with scattered seating.
Marketing programs are now driven by information on the customer. Social media sites have become the gold mine for data on the users, including their tastes, habits, destinations (length of time in each), shopping patterns, and lifestyles. With the right analysis of what is now called “big data” the marketing message is tailored to what a “granular” segment wants to hear on a product or service.
Still, the mantra of “know your customer” (KYC) can be overdone. There is a caveat in the saying that familiarity breeds contempt. A line is crossed when mining data on the customer from different sources constitutes a breach of privacy.
Sometimes a customer simply craves for anonymity. He may opt for out-of-the-way bar where he is just considered a walk-in. Isn’t there a market for places that routinely offer privacy to the customer? Fussing too much (how was your soup today, Sir?) can be considered obtrusive — please, I’m trying to explain the Pythagorean theorem to my grandniece here.
Knowing the customer should also include understanding when he just wants to be served, then left alone and be quickly forgotten.
Tony Samson is chairman and CEO, TOUCH xda
ar.samson@yahoo.com
