Understand the Customer Intensity Metric for your Business

In part one, we introduced this concept of customer intensity as a metric, and defined it as having three constituent components: customer loyalty, amount owned of available attention and capital, and net perceived value delivered by your brand. Here, in part two, we will be discussing how to find metrics for each of these components for your business.

Customer Loyalty

First up, customer loyalty. What metrics do you have to measure customer loyalty? This could be something like purchases per week, or looking at visits to your storefront or website. Depending on your business, expanding outside of customers to include other categories of your audience, like prospects, may also make sense.

Oftentimes finding multiple metrics for customer loyalty allows more flexibility and accuracy, with loyalty targets set appropriate to that platform. Be generous in including metrics, initially, and then pare down as you understand the core constituent metrics. In most cases, over time, look to pare down metrics that seem to deliver the same customers and simplify your analysis by reviewing their inclusion.

However, do not disregard metrics that are surfacing different customers than your other customer loyalty metrics. One metrics will capture one kind of loyalty, and one metric captures another. For example, if you have some loyal customers who order regularly but do not engage with you on social media, look to capture their loyalty through metrics measuring their purchase frequency, and look for your metrics around social media loyalty to be capturing other kinds of loyal customers

Look for places that metrics can work in conjunction — assume that no single metric is telling you the complete story for customer loyalty.

Available Attention

To catch customers that demonstrate loyalty through cross-platform behavior, look to our second component, customers that have expanded the amount of attention and capital available to your brand. As you evaluate this component of the metric, it may become apparent that your company’s channels to connect with your customers have evolved organically, versus intentional design. Does it make sense to build out more channels for your customers to connect with your company?

Social media platforms are an easy solution, but building other paths can be very helpful for attracting more kinds of customers. Companies like Fundrise actively try to convert their customers into shareholders. Would something like that make sense for your business? Perhaps leveraging an advocacy model, like Tupperware did with its Poly-T parties in the 1940s and 1950s, with a “honored hostess” introducing the product to her friends, would make sense for your business — essentially creating another channel for your more intensely vested customers to engage with you.

To discover these intensely vested customers that you have already, look for those who are connecting across your existing platforms. Maybe you have some customers who often leave reviews, or frequently comment on other customers’ posts.

Try to have metrics that value these types of behaviors — not only value creation of new content — as time & attention spent can be just as important measures of customer intensity as investments of social capital.

In addition, it can be useful to have less stringent metrics than you may have for a single platform view — attention is a finite resource, and your multi-platform connected customers may be less deeply engaged on any singular platform.

Net Perceived Value

Third and final component is net perceived value. Which customers feel like your brand has done a lot for them?

The desire to achieve reciprocity is a systemic bias within humans — the emotion pushes people to achieve parity in their relationships. Customers who feel this way will act as though they owe something to you.

What does that mean for your business? Do you have customers that consistently review your products? Maybe they respond to your emails to tell you about typos, or to tell you about drip emails that don’t make sense? Maybe they are certain people that your customer support team knows as “nice” customers.

Look into these types of people. As you get more exposure to them and different kinds of customers, try to assign some sort of subjective measure to the value they seem to get from your product. In some businesses it may make sense to have a 5 point scale, in other businesses something like a low-medium-high may make more sense.

With metrics for these three components in hand, create groupings that value highly those at the intersection.

You may need to spend some time adjusting the weightage, as new customers come in and you are able to see how the accurately the groupings and metrics work to surface your intensely engaged customers.

Keep in mind some components may be less initially less impactful, or need to be weighted less, at this stage in your business journey. Weightage re-adjustment is expected and important and should happen regularly as your audience and the market will continue to change.

Interesting? Send us feedback! In future posts we can dive further, including discussing how to use these groupings and the customer intensity metric to educate your product and marketing direction.