Keeping customers – listening to customers – building closer relationships with your best customers

It’s easier – and cheaper – to keep an existing customer than find a new one. This marketing maxim is common sense, yet most marketing effort seems to go into the more glamorous pursuit of winning new customers. So let’s think about how we can make the most of our existing customers (the good ones!), by listening to them, understanding their points of view, and then doing more business with them.

Creative businesses which have chosen the right customers find it much easier to listen to their clients and build long-lasting relationships with them.  Market research  (ie listening to customers) is essentially about respecting customers and taking an attitude that they are people from whom we can learn rather than just ‘punters’ we can sell to. The term ‘market research’ tends to make us think about expensive surveys but in fact some of the best market research is inexpensive and low-key; it’s about taking the time to find ways to understand what the customer really wants from our creative products or services.

Useful and proven techniques for listening to customers include focus groups and questionnaires. Focus groups provide a setting for people to discuss ideas in an informal way to draw out new ideas and unexpected opinions. (Why not take a few clients out for a drink and a chat?). Questionnaires can be easily set up online using free or low-cost services such as Survey Monkey , to test consumers’ opinions about how well you are doing.

Finding out what customers really value can be surprising and valuable insights can be gleaned from understanding their different perspectives. For example purchasers of sculpture might be more interested in an investment than the art for its own sake; and theatre-goers might be buying into a community as much as a performance.

Hong Kong fashion designers Dialog recognise that they are selling hope along with their t-shirts; and poetry publishers could be selling books as cultural accessories as much as pages of literature. It’s important to understand that customers often want to buy an experience, a story, ‘belonging’, or status from the creative enterprise. So we should package and enhance our offerings to add value in these ways. They might even want to buy a little bit of the creator through a meeting with him/her or an ongoing dialogue. The ‘story' of having met the performer or artist can be what the customer treasures most. We don’t know until we ask them and open ourselves up to the possibility that customers might see value in different ways than we expect them to.

Once we understand the various ways in which customers value what creative businesses are selling, we an add value – and increase the price accordingly. The right packaging, a signed letter from the creator, a souvenir of the experience, a written guarantee, or detailed information about the product can greatly add value for the customer at little expense to the creative enterprise.

So if you regard your best customers as partners rather than targets, give them ‘a good listening to’ instead of talking at them, they will reveal new insights about your creative enterprise and ways in which it could delight its customers even more.

But in terms of your relationship with your customers, the big question is this, are you prepared to listen?

Copyright © David Parrish 2009. www.davidparrish.com