top-takeaways-and-faqs-from-unlock-your-customers-secrets

Recently our very own Phil Baratz was at the Eastern Energy EXPO in Hershey, PA and NEFI EXPO in Worcester, MA where he presented “How to unlock your customer’s secrets”. He received thoughtful questions so we put together a list of the top takeaways and FAQs.

  1. Analyzing your customer base to better understand how they will act in the future is not only possible but as more and more dealers are acting on this “predictive” need, that analysis is now required.
  2. The data needed to start the process of predicting future behavior is NOT something that you need to go out and get – it is almost always based on information that is easily obtained from your existing back office software (BOS).
  3. You do not need to hire a bunch of MIT geniuses to understand more about your customers.
  4. If you have not been populating your BOS with clean and complete (or mostly complete) data, you NEED to start implementing better data capture procedures within your organization.
  5. If you have clean data, before spending the time to try to better predict customer behavior, ask yourself “Will I change our company behavior if I knew which of our customers are more likely to leave than others?
  6. Computer models, whether we like it or not, have started to replace gut feelings in almost every area of marketing and customer service.  If you don’t think that it is happening in our industry, you probably can ignore the rest of this.
  7. At a bare minimum, you need to know what types (segments) of customers are more likely to stay than others – hint:  it is usually a combination of things (aka “variables”), not just “budget customers” or “service contract customers.”
  8. “Modeling”, which is the basis for any type of prediction, can be done for just about anything that you have questions about:  retention, profitability, referability, etc.

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