Customer focused has become a cliché, it appears in a wide range of material, usually it seems, written by people who have never interacted with a customer in their lives.

So how do you measure customer focused? Here are some basic things you need to know before the expression will be more than a cliché:

1. We know the characteristics of a loyal customer, not just the social economic, but the behavioral  drivers they experience
2. We understand the relative value of our value proposition to different types of customers.
3. We measure customer profitability over more than just one, or one periods transactions.
4. We know why we lose customers, and actively manage the loss of unprofitable customers.
5. We know how much it costs to attract, and retain profitable customers.
6. We know where we sit on a customers “value curve” the trade-off customers make between the relative cost and utility of our products, Vs the opposition.
7. We set out to measure the “advocacy” of our customers for our products.
8. We collect data from non customers who use opposition products, and we understand them, and the attraction of the oppositions offer Vs ours.
9. Everyone in the firm recognises that it is not just sales people who have the responsability to serve customers, but everyone in the firm has a role in providing that service, from the CEO to the cleaner, and they all rely on continued customer support for their employment.

When you are well advanced in all of the above, you will be reasonably able to call yourselves “customer focussed”

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How do you measure customer profitability? Customer planning with the customer Customer churn and the quality of sales If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. Right?