1. Mining potential customers
At present, cross-border e-commerce enterprises mainly use the Internet to find potential customers. Customer service staff can log in to some websites where enterprises publish supply and demand information to find relevant customers with needs. At the same time, they can also post their own product information on the Internet to attract some customers.
2. Identify valuable customers
American William Shedden’s 80/20/30 rule believes that the top 20% of customers create 80% of the company’s profits, but half of the profits are consumed by the bottom 30% of non-profit customers. In other words, the excess value brought to the company by some high-quality customers is usually killed by many “bad” customers. It can be seen that the number of customers is no longer the best indicator to measure the profitability of an enterprise. The quality of customers has negated the number of customers to a certain extent, and the quality of customers largely determines the size of the company’s profits. Therefore, what the company should maintain is valuable customers, and there is no need to establish relationships with all customers.
Identifying valuable customers requires enterprises to treat different customers differently. Enterprises should not only distinguish between commercial customers and personal customers, but also take different management measures for different customer levels.
(1) Category A customers: the primary customers of the enterprise, and the customers that the enterprise should do its utmost to retain.
(2) Category B customers: customers with considerable potential. The enterprise should have considerable investment guarantees to maintain this type of customers.
(3) Category C customers: the core customers of the enterprise. The enterprise should gradually increase its investment in this type of customers.
(4) Category D customers: customers that the enterprise has not been able to win. Due to some uncontrollable factors, the customer life cycle is about to end. The enterprise should try to reduce its investment in this type of customers.
(5) Category E customers: low-level customers of the enterprise. The enterprise should reduce its investment in them.
(6) Category F customers: unattractive customers. The enterprise should consider withdrawing investment and stopping providing services to these customers.
In short, customers at different levels have different responses to service quality. Category A customers have a significant impact on the enterprise’s market strategy and bring the greatest profit to the company. The goal of customer relationship management is to retain these customers and maintain a long-term and stable strategic relationship. B and C customers are the main profitable customers of the enterprise, which can bring considerable profits to the enterprise and may become the largest source of profit for the company. The purpose of implementing customer relationship management for these customers is to increase their share of purchasing products or receiving services from the company. D and E customers are a large number of customers who do not contribute much to the value of the enterprise. The enterprise must maintain them, but does not need to pay special attention to them. F customers are customers who may cause losses to the enterprise. They occupy too much of the enterprise’s resources but cannot bring profits to the enterprise, and the enterprise must learn to give up. Eliminating these customers can greatly reduce the management workload of the enterprise’s customer service staff.