Customer Capital
Customer capital is the measure of the strength of relationships with your customers.
It is important to view a business from the eyes of its customer. This allows owners to see where their business excels and their organization’s areas for growth. What are three things a customer would say the business does well and what would they say the business should stop doing as an organization? By seeing a business through its customer’s eyes, owners can address pain points and meet the customer’s needs. y auditing a business customer list based on their product types, industry, service, and demographic indicators, advisors and owners gain an understanding of key customer types and gaps in their customer base.
One simple step towards improving the customer capital in a business is to have a baseline understanding of value. By auditing a business customer list based on their product types, industry, service, and demographic indicators, advisors and owners gain an understanding of key customer types and gaps in their customer base.
“Two of the important parts of Customer Capital are a diverse customer base and key customers not being tied to the owner or to any one key employee. A diverse customer base means that no one customer or small group of customers constitutes a large percentage of overall revenue.”
Businesses that are extremely owner-dependent often have negatively impacted intangible capitals. If the majority of a business's customers work entirely with the owner, when that owner ultimately exits the business, the buyer runs the risk of losing a large portion of their total client base.
Strong Customer Capital is not only beneficial for the current owners but is also transferable to the potential future owners
Improve Customer Capital by working through the following checklist.
- Establish a steering committee focused on customer engagement
- Calibrate your client experience based on customer feedback and needs
- Encourage leaders on your team to take initiative in the customer journey
- Establish clear metrics to measure the success of your strategy ! How strong are your relationships with customers?
- Is your business integral to your customers’ success because the products/services you offer are unique?
- Are these relationships deep, long-term, and contractual?
- Are the relationships delivered in a consistent, reliable, and recurring fashion?
- Most of all, are these relationships transferable.