Assess Your Company Position

There are many different ways to measure your customers. You can measure things like overall satisfaction, finding out how customers see various aspects of your business. You can also measure loyalty, looking for whether or not customers are truly loyal to your company and its products.

But you're interested in much more than that. One of the things your company should be interested in the amount of the individual's finances that they spend at your store, relative to the amount they are spending in total. An example: You run a study that shows a customer is both satisfied and loyal.

They regularly go to your store for their needs. You ask them how much they spend on average on your type of industry – say, groceries. They say they spend an average of $5,000 a year.

You then ask how much of that they spend at your store, and you find out they spend $2,000 a year. That means that somewhere this individual is spending $3,000 that could be spent at your store. You can learn a lot from this: This may imply that you are not offering the products this individual needs, and so by finding out more information you can expand your product base and ultimately earn more revenue from this loyal and satisfied customer.

This may imply that a competitor has managed to interest them, and so while they may be loyal to your company in practice, they are also shopping at a competitor's store instead and spending more of their money. This may imply that they don't think of your store as a source for all of their needs due to marketing, or some other reason other than you not offering the right products. You can explore this as well.

These are just a few examples. It's also possible that the customer is not satisfied or not loyal, and that affects where they shop. Either way, you learn several things – you learn that there is more you need to explore, and you learn that there is a lot more money you can make from this customer if you figure out where to look.

For companies that are looking to improve their revenue, finding out how much a customer spends at your store compared to what they could be spending at your store can be very valuable. Consider running a survey that looks at this information to give your company a boost.