Building the Perfect Customer

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Building the Perfect Customer graphic

Does your organization believe that the "Perfect Customer" exists? Does your customer experience team look at your customer within that frame of mind? Do you believe that if more of your customers behaved in a "Perfect" way, for example, adopted paperless billing, that it would save your organization significant revenue? Do you believe that if more of your customers exhibited "Perfect Customer" behaviors and attitudes that it would create more efficiencies that translated to your bottom line? Do you believe that by building the "Perfect Customer" you could more easily justify customer experience investments because the your market share increased as a result? Absolutely!

You can build efficiencies into your customer's behavior by identifying and classifying what the "Perfect Customer" is in your organization.

There's a cascading process for creating those behaviors and building the "Perfect Customer" for an organization. If you improve customer experience, then you will improve the quality and strength of your relationship with the customer. If that's successful, you can move to modifying customer behavior in the manner that will generate revenue, whether through increased customer purchasing or operational efficiencies. It would make sense, then, that customers who have higher overall customer satisfaction scores exhibit a greater amount of "Perfect" behaviors.

A sound customer-experience strategy yields positive benefits on both sides of the profit and loss statement. On the one side, engaged and happy customers are more likely to buy more and refer others to you, and are less likely to switch to a competitor. On the other hand, thoughtful experience design, done with the goal of modifying customer behaviors, can help you lower operational costs in customer-facing processes.

—Customer Experience for Dummies, Chapter 2: Dollars and Sense: The Financial Impact of Customer Experience

Building Blocks Start with an Inquiry

To best understand how to build your "Perfect Customer," gather a team of senior people from a broad cross-section of your organization and inquire:

  • What are the behaviors, attitudes, characteristics and qualities of our "Perfect Customer"?
  • How does our "Perfect Customer" define the "Perfect Company" that they want to do business with? (Looking at it in reverse can open up other aspects of your "Perfect Customer")
  • How can we correlate these perfect behaviors, attitudes, characteristics and qualities into tangible actions to efficiencies, revenue and market share?
  • What are we doing now that encourages "Perfect Customer" behaviors?
  • What could we do better to cultivate more "Perfect Customer" behaviors?

After this inquiry you'll be better prepared to invest in the strategies that can get you through the cascading process that improves your overall customer engagement. And that's bottom line results you can take to the bank.