It's easy to assume that someone, the individual or company, we spend money with, are a good customer, and spend most of the best customers are. The businesses all too often chasing "of the â € numbers more customers and larger orders. Both strategies can be disastrous while companies exceeding accecate through the level of activity pure, without calculating the costs of providing a service to ever more customers and convinced that enough zeros after the sign of the pound must indicate a profit. Just think back to Internet bubble 90s or examine the call centres overloaded the current decade. Too few businesses stop to consider what makes a customer a good customer.  given the enormous cost of customer acquisition, with the market introduction, sales, advertising, direct mail, exhibitions and a raft of other costly activities undertaken with this aim, it is perhaps time IT contributed to or even started, this debate.  because this is all IT ™ s concern of the departmentâ €? As has the power of computing to analyze, to outline and identify good customers and good customers take less time-machine nell'immagazzinaggio file, requests, complaints, the center call records.  the best score is probably a customer today. Not every existing customer is true, but a good many of them. Most businesses are investing very much nell'aquisizione that the restraint. However, with a customer present, the cost of acquisition has already been amortized and the cost of restraint is usually reasonably low. The inertia can be a wonderful thing. Consider our own reluctance to change the brand as a consumer or to change the supplier as trade, often also faced with unsatisfactory experience and competitive tenders attractive. Despite the value and inherent fairness of the current score, we can fall over ourselves for corteggiare and impress the new customer, often at the expense of direct service to existing customers, or even the alienation and get a worse deal that new customers ( just look at the bank and business building).  most of the data is there in IT systems to be refined further, develop profiles of which are profitable customers. This must cross the contours, sales, administration groove, service to the customer and departmental finances. In the first place you could identify those customers who spend regularly and pay on time. You could probably with a little work, spulare out those who take the time disproportionate questions or complaints, "â € of the call-center, interrupting the production programmes changing requirements of delivery, the people who rispedice things, all things that add to the cost of sales. So, we first points towards the identification of a low-cost customer â "good of € to buy or maintain, low-cost service and low cost to collect payment. A good customer is a customer benefit and probably a good committed to free trade too!  if we can identify which customers are profitable, then it stands to reason that we can develop a profile that, like good score. If we are examining consumers, we can identify where they live, what kind of work have married or choose, the age group. In a mobile phone, I worked inside, we are able to analyze 400,000 subscribers across 54 countries in two groups by lifestyle, by position, from financial data, by marital status. It took a commitment and an enormous investment of time and some money. In a purely business the same exercise can be done with perhaps a few groups. These groups can then be arranged in a table of good direct to customers undesirable. For even more sophistication, we could weigh the points to give more on the mark to score today, the debtor normal known. equipped with this kind of data, the mobile phone company could resolve that the minutes taken to have authorised the most support from catchment area, through, finally, indicating customers from high-risk groups pay-as-you – to go rather than contract. What you complete up with is a cube modeling (illustration?) Of most major customer scriv through to the most minimum important to your business. Several things  are the result of delineamento of customers; good customers may likely be designated more efficient, freeing resources on sales and sales while evit diare invest in the achievement of potential customers who are going to be very expensive assist and then "not great advantage of the â € on mobile sopraccennata, 43% of calls to call centre were € ™ of the noiseâ ~ of the â €, the people who was not likely to become or even desirable as customers. The volume of customer, rather than quality, tends to be expensive, since the service the customer gets both the spread thinly and always expensive (training, turnover, etc.) and reduces the quality of service to all customers, good and bad. The retain score decreases accordingly. To say nothing of the fact that assist the ™ defect of the customersâ € ~ of the â € can push costs up front to bring income. The delineamento also, of course identifies the current customers that we should be rewarding for their loyalty.  good, profitable customers are the Holy Grail. So much so that it can be worth it to explore the possibility of investing more not only in restraint of good customers but the acquisition of new products to sell to existing good customers rather than acquiring new customers.

Thanks Nick Rowley!

Related articles

• Business Management Training 101