On their worst day, what can you do to make your customer’s situation better, less frustrating, and memorable in a positive way?

By MARK RIFFEY for the Flathead Beacon

We all want customers for life – at least if they’re good customers. The challenge is finding them, right? Once you know what they look, sound, and act like, you’ll know what to look for. For some, that’ll probably work. For others, you’ll have work to do.

Finding customers for life

Finding customers for life should start with how you find new customers. There’s a decent possibility that you can find more of them by doing a close analysis of the ones you already have. That assumes you can identify which customers have been with you “forever”. A fair portion of them should exhibit similar needs, wants, responses, purchase habits, and other tendencies / similarities.

Depending on the information you have about your customers, it might not be terribly difficult to discern these subset of things that trend for lifetime customers. Having figured that out, you could use that information in your marketing copy and to emphasize where you market (ie: which types of media, which publications / sites / locations). You’d also want to use this information to segment your leads if the critical lifetime indicator data is available for your leads.

Creating customers for life

Perhaps easier than finding customers for life is taking exceptionally good care of everyone and paying attention to the things they appreciate most. Once you identify those things and have observed customer reactions to them, you’ll do more of them – and which ones to emphasize.

Taking extra steps

Recently, I witnessed a family member making calls to financial firms, insurance companies, and similar businesses after a relative passed. Listening to the calls was excruciating to me – not because of the loss of the relative, but because of the incessant frustration they subjected their decades-long customer to after paying these businesses for a very long time. The worst part was that this customer was dealing with accounts, policies, etc involving the person who passed – and didn’t seem to be getting the least bit of empathy, no matter what the result of the call. I heard this sort of thing on call after call – it was rather unbelievable and pretty frustrating even though I wasn’t directly involved. I wondered how a company could possibly do something like that – intentionally – at what was clearly during one of the worst parts of their customer’s life.

After dealing with that, can you imagine that person’s comments to other family members who are considering updates to their insurance, banking situation, etc? Who would they recommend to a friend or family member? Who might they offer a negative recommendation about?

These are the kinds of observations you need to make to not only make someone a customer for life, but to turn their entire family into customers for life. More importantly, how should you do these things differently? Remember that protecting the company on these calls isn’t just about the explicit protection of observable company assets. It’s also about the customer – whose relationship with the company is also a valuable asset.

Things to consider

It struck me that the very best people doing customer service for these companies should be segmented off into a group whose only responsibility is taking care of long-time customers who have just lost a spouse (or similar).

A department designed for this and whose staff is trained solely to deal with those situations (even if by the book) would likely behave a bit different than the average and typical team of customer service reps who are trained to handle a wide scope of situations. They’re often monitored for time on the phone with each customer and/or number of calls handled per day. These are not metrics that you’d want to use when handling someone who recently lost a spouse. Yet that’s exactly what happens if the primary customer service team handles these calls in the mix with everything else they do.

Would an elder law firm handle clients like this in a similar situation? I’m guessing not.

Consider the situations your customers for life will face throughout their lifetime as your customer. Whether they’re buying cars, insurance, web sites, or whatever – there’s a sequence of life events that the customer deals with during that time frame. What can you do to consider those in advance, perhaps reduce their impact, and at the absolute least, do what’s possible to soften the blow and make the customer’s situation better, less frustrating, and memorable in a positive way?

Want to learn more about Mark or ask him to write about a strategic, operations or marketing problem? See Mark’s site, contact him on LinkedIn or Twitter, or email him at mriffey@flatheadbeacon.com.