How we treat our customers

Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 6:46 am

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Over at Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog I spotted a very thought provoking post. As marketers we tend to focus our efforts on acquiring new customers, and don’t spend much time or effort on existing customers - yet this isn’t sensible if we really think about it.

Kathy suggests that if we put more effort into helping people get more out of the product they’ve purchased we can create more loyalty, which in the long term will translate into more cross-sales and personal recommendation.

Seth Godin endorses Kathy’s views, but Darren Barefoot has a different take on Kathy’s post.

This reminds me of a concept that I learnt back in my economics lessons at school - utility - basically how much value a user/customer gets from a product.

As marketers we need to maximise the utility customers think they’re getting from a product or service. That’s why marketers for intangible services like to ensure they give customers something tangible as well as the service itself. And that’s why making sure users can actually use a fair proportion of a product’s features is important.

Providing a decent manual isn’t an indication that the product is hard to use - although it should be secondary to ensuring a product is simple to use in the first place.

Ensuring maximum utility from a product means that customers will have their purchase decision re-affirmed - they will feel a warm glow because they will feel confirmation that they did the right thing in buying a product. And this will lead to more loyalty in the longer term and more recommendation to other prospective customers.

Tags: customer+experience, Marketing

Comments on “How we treat our customers”

Simon Wakeman - Week in view - w/e September 1st 2006
Friday, September 1st, 2006 at 10:27 pm
[...] That’s not to say I won’t blog in the week as well, but will hopefully be able to cover a bit more ground by producing a round-up as well. I spotted a very thought provoking post about how marketers tend to focus efforts on acquiring new customers, and don’t spend much time or effort on existing customers. Seth Godin weighed in his support, but Darren Barefoot had a different take on Kathy’s post. Didn’t mean to, but ended up writing a full post about this after all. [...]

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Simon Wakeman

I've been on the web since 2001 and have been blogging about marketing and public relations since January 2006.

I'm currently Head of Marketing at Medway Council as well as a freelance marketing and PR consultant.

The content and opinions expressed on this website are not endorsed by nor reflect the views of any company or organisation I work with.

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