The customer IQ of your business is an indicator of whether you know what to deliver and to whom across your customer base. The more you know about your customers, the greater your chances of delivering on what they want.
A new report (PDF) by Clutch titled, “What is Your Customer IQ? Understanding and Increasing Customer Equity” makes the case for why customer equity is more important than brand equity.
According to the report, building customer equity entails delivering on the best experience possible, not once or twice, but every time. This Clutch says will ensure long-term customer relationships and in turn retention.
However, it goes on to say, “Customer equity is essentially the amount of times a company can miss the mark and by how far they can miss before a customer leaves you.” By being aware of what you have missed, you will avoid the mistakes which will lead to customer attrition.
Because as the report points out, 51% of customers will never do business with a company after just one negative experience. Therefore each experience must be delivered at 100% because being underappreciated is the number one reason customer jump ship to another provider for products and services.
For small business owners, improving their customer IQ is more important than ever because the competition is not just the store next door. With eCommerce, it can come from any business around the world. But this also means you can also increase your customer base if you identify who they are and what they want, which means improving your customer IQ and equity.
Customer IQ and Customer Equity
Clutch defines customer IQ as “The indicator of whether the company knows what to deliver and to whom across their customer base, which is the true indicator of trending future value, whether up or down.”
Customer IQ allows businesses to know their customer so they can execute on their demands and needs with a clear understanding of what they are looking for.
This is made possible by embracing the available technology in today’s digital ecosystem and putting the customer at the center of your business while building organization-wide intelligence around them. By using customer-generated data to improve the CE, the growth of the customer equity in your company will increase your customer IQ.
Delivering on this Knowledge
Clutch says businesses must first understand the customer and execute on what you know to deliver on the experience. And in order to understand the customer, you have to know who your customer is.
And knowing the customer lets you execute with greater accuracy/efficiency by delivering what they want. This also shows how well your business is doing or not, which is a great opportunity to fix a problem before it gets much worse.
Clutch says, “The sooner everyone knows we might be slipping the sooner we can get back to learn more and right the ship on delivering on the experience that our customers are expecting, even as things change or our customers’ expectations change.”
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