I am not always excited if somebody tells me I have acquired a new customer. I always look at what is in the plan of the marketing & product teams to make these customers use all the features and benefits of the product, so that these customers can be with them for life. Not too many companies pay attention to onboarding customers. They acquire and forget. Or they pay a lot of attention to how to acquire customers but not do enough review of what is done to keep and grow these customers. Kevin Zimmerman, Sr. Editor, at Peppers & Rogers writes:
Consumer electronics companies and retailers are finding out the hard way what happens when you don't educate customers. Take, for example, the recent situation involving the purchase of popular high-definition televisions (HDTVs). According to Forrester Research Analyst James McQuivey, 20 percent of the sets sold have been returned in some U.S. regions, in large part by consumers who didn't realize what they were buying. Per an ESPN/Knowledge Networks/Statistical Research Inc. study, only 64 percent of homes with an HDTV have HD programming via broadcast or cable, and 13 percent of people who own an HD set do not know if they receive an HD signal. McQuivey forecasts the 20 percent figure will drop moving forward, as more retailers see the need to educate customers about the format if they want to avoid such massive returns.
Who's responsible for customer education?
Henry Choy, senior analyst at Jon Peddie Research says ""The store should do a better job of educating customers, the documentation inside the box must be better, cable companies can get more involved,"..
For a moment, if we as marketers think like customers, then count the number of times we would have read an operating manual, the number times we would have used the features that we primarily bought the product for, the number of times a company that we bought the product from, called to tell you if you have understood the features and used them. In my case, it is close to zero. That's the opportunity waiting to be tapped - Onboard your customers and you will realize there's profits to be made for life.
www.customerworld.typepad.com