By Jeofrey Bean
To improve customer retention and loyalty you must aim for THE HOLY GRAIL of customer experience.
Do this by purposefully creating a customer experience that goes beyond traditional customer service and customer satisfaction. Segment customers by experience creates with the measurable goal of creating active advocates for your business. Customer experience leaders consider: What should the customer experience be? and then consciously creates a complete experience to answer that question.
But one size (or one experience) doesn’t fit all. Segments or groups of customers may require different experiences. If your company can tailor the customer experience to a variety of customer segments, it will be on track to providing every customer with a great experience and increasing your percentage of active advocates.
Four Seasons Resorts knows that its customers have many different preferences for a vacation. They offer a variety of hotel options based on the customer’s interest in beaches, skiing, family travel, golf, and more. For each vacation option, Four Seasons provides different hotel choices, different activities, and a different customer experience. Everyone is happy.
Market segmentation used to be based on needs, economics, key performance indicators and demographics. But today’s segmentation based on customer experience relates to what the customer wants your product or service to do for them in a pleasing and timely way. This is true for business to business, business to consumer and hybrids of both market types.
For a supermarket, customer can be segmented this way: those who prefer home delivery, those who call in their order but pick it up at the store, and those who come in the store and select for themselves. Each segment will have a different customer experience with the store, which can be tailor-made for each segment.
Learn about what your customers want along the entire customer experience continuum including your messages, people, processes, products and services. Compare your customers to each other so you can understand how they are the same and how they are different:
1. Economically
2. Emotionally
3. How they value and want to use time
4. What can you Do-For them that they truly value to create advocacy
Do they divide into a number of segments that are insightful for your decision making, their engagement and advocacy? Then create a customer experience designed especially for each. Segmentation by customer experience is a best practice of leading customer experience companies.
Go beyond traditional customer service and customer satisfaction. Improve customer retention and loyalty to create active advocates. Segment by customer experience.
Jeofrey Bean is the author of the business leadership books Customer Experience Rules! and best-selling customer experience book The Customer Experience Revolution: How Companies like Apple, Amazon, and Starbucks Have Changed Business Forever.
He assists companies in making successful decisions about Internet marketing strategies and customer service improving customer experience, as advisor, keynote speaker and by leading training seminars or workshops.
Jeofrey is known for innovative yet practical insights delivered with a dash of humor at venues including J.D. Power Service Excellence Summit and as a guest on host John Hockenberry’s “The Take Away” program on National Public Radio (NPR – PRI). He also a part-time Professor of Business Management and Marketing at UC San Diego Extension teaching Internet Marketing and Customer Experience leadership.
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