Customer Value and Priority
There are two major areas where customer value and priority must be considered: Resource prioritization and Insight gathering.
RESOURCE PRIORITIZATION
The practical reality is that not all customers are created equal. The challenge for the CCO lies in determining which customers need and deserve greater attention and whose opinions deserve greater weight, and most importantly, in a crisis, which customers must be serviced first so as to protect the greater assets of the company. The CCO must ensure that a company retains key customers and avoid the situation where resources are spread too thin over every customer or are focused on lesser-value customers.
One of the great challenges lies in prioritizing customers according to their value to the company AND to the value these customers derive from their interactions with the company.
Ideal customers are valuable to the company and derive high value from the company, but some customers may be strategically valuable but not value the products/services they purchase. Conversely, customers may place an extreme value on the products/services they consume but may not (yet) be recognized by the company as an important customer. In this case, the company may be leaving money on the table and ignoring potentially high-value customers, leaving them open for poaching by competitors.
It is important to resolve issues according to the value of customers. Clearly Tier-1 accounts are critically important to business health and must have their needs addressed promptly. However, some customers may be the vocal minority and are of lower strategic or financial value to the company. Trade-offs and decisions must always be weighed according to the relative value of the customer.
CUSTOMER INSIGHT GATHERING
It is important for the CCO not to focus attention exclusively on Tier-1 customers when gathering customer insight. What sometimes happens is that the biggest and largest customers are the only input into the analysis and development process and smaller, more adept customers begin to take the industry in different directions as they adopt disruptive technologies.
There are a number of different ways to establish customer value, such as through Tiered accounts, which is the most basic and commonly used and typically only considers annual revenue. However, other factors are also valuable, such as: Profitability, Strategic Value, Lifecycle Analyses, and Value-Based Segmentation.