Identifying the right customers

I went to Naples during the weekend and I twittered about some of the things I did. An hour later a restaurant I didn't go to became a follower. I wonder what will they think of my next 1000 posts that will not make any reference to Naples or their businesses. Monitoring my tweets will be a waste of resources for them.

Social networking tools allow us to come closer to our customers, the new information and interactions should provide clues as to how better serve them and increase the revenue coming from them, but along with this increased revenue comes increased service and information mining costs (among others).

The challenge for us is to identify those customers that matter and it is useful to get closer to, for example: customers that represent the bulk of our user base, customers that lead in trends and know where the service should go, repeat customers. Also identify those customers that negatively matter, for example: serial complainer, serial returner or service abuser.

But there is a third category: the useless customer - this may be a one time customer and it is circumstantial that is using your service or product. This category of customer needs to be serviced to the highest standard (to avoid bad word of mouth and because it should be part of the service experience), but you have to be careful about the information gathering and relationship forming. Also, get a lot of misidentified customers like me and you get an skewed vision of your customer base.

When there is no benefit for you to have a relationship, you should not form it. Avoid wasting resources in customers that will not have an effect in your business, concentrate in those that matter.