Key questions for new businesses on customer segmentation and loyalty

Shoppers at Uchumi Supermarkets. Automated service is the cheapest option to interact with your customers, but it may hurt loyalty. FILE 

By Scott Bellows

In Summary

• While some clients marvel at self-service, others prefer interacting with the store clerks.

 

Oduwo hurriedly headed to Sheria House. The day finally reached whereby he would register a company and start his business.

Following years practising medicine in Kitale, Mr Oduwo envisioned setting up affordable private family health clinics across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania.

He segmented his prospective clients, understood the value propositions to his selected customer segments, and pondered the appropriate channels to deliver his proposed value.

However, Mr Oduwo contemplated how to interact with and take customer payments. Due to the high volumes he expected to enter his clinics, how long would patient queues reach inside and outside his clinics? Could payments get collected automatically?

Customer relationships describe the types of interactions a company establishes with specific customer segments. What type of relationship does each of your customer segments expect you to establish and maintain with them?

When the sale concludes, do you walk away or do your clients need more follow-up? Should you simply follow-up as a good marketing technique for future repeat sales?

Additional questions posed by writers Osterwalder and Pigneur include: which customer relationships have you already established? How costly are the customer relationship options? How might the customer relationship options integrate with the rest of your business model?

Inasmuch, please examine the following six options for your start-up business:

Do your customer segments require personal assistance? Is human interaction necessary for your purchasers to buy your product or service?

Personal assistance remains a common need in Kenya from automobile dealers to insurance firms to mama mbogas selling vegetables. Kenyans like personal human interaction to buy goods and services.

Do your clients require dedicated personal assistance?

As an example, if your firm sells components required in the construction of mobile phone towers, then you likely should dedicate four specific sales representative to exclusively deal separately with Airtel, Safaricom, Orange, and Yu since you would likely only possess these four clients in your business, each one representing huge potential sales volumes.

You would certainly not want Safaricom to have to call your main office line and be placed on hold as a receptionist tracks down someone who may or may not know the details of the Safaricom account.

Dedicated

Clearly a major high-shilling-volume customer needs to reach one and only one regular person who knows everything about their account, history, and needs.