Can You Research Only Your Worst Customers?

Earlier we had an article about how researching your best customers may be advantageous. The idea is that the customers that bring you the most revenue (rather than simply shopping clearance or buying the least valuable products, for example) may provide you with more useful data from which to make decisions with regard to the future of your company than the customers that shop at your store regularly but rarely provide much value. Of course, your best customers are not your only customers, and there may be reasons to try the exact opposite strategy: researching your less valuable customers.

Increase Purchases Your less valuable customers have shown loyalty to your company. Your next step is to try to figure out how to improve on that loyalty so that they bring more revenue. Researching their needs specifically may help you figure out how to turn them into more profitable customers, and see if you can motivate them to spend more at your store.

Keep More Customers It's not always known what makes one customer start spending more at your store, but chances are that the more customers you have, the more likely you'll find more valuable customers in the future. Rarely is there a customer that causes a company to lose value, and the more customers you have come into your store, the better your revenue stream will be. Identify Greater Profit Ideas If you know that there are those that only spend a very small amount of money at your store, you can find a way to take advantage of those customers to build value.

For example, offering more low cost items with the intention of making revenue off of quantity rather than price might be something you discover. Or, if you run a B2B company, you may find that charging clients for customer care reduces their use of it, thus improving their value to your company.

Determining the value of specific customers can be difficult, especially if you don't have a system in place that identifies good vs. bad customers. But if you can find a way to separate the groups, you may find that researching your less valuable customers has more value (or different value) to your company than researching only your valuable customers or all of your customers together. The above list represents some of the benefits you can achieve by researching your "less valuable" customers. Related Articles: Customer Satisfaction Survey Market Research Survey