CUSTOMER RELATIONS

SELF - LEARNING MATERIAL 2

WEEK 2

Knowing and Understanding Your Customers

Knowing and Understanding Your Customers

INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the Self-Learning Material (SLM) for Customer Relations!
Developing a relationship with your customers is one of most effective strategies a
business can adopt. Studying customer relations strategy can help you deliver
tremendous ROI, boost customer acquisition, loyalty, and satisfaction.

This self-learning material was designed to provide you with fun and meaningful
opportunities for guided and independent learning at your own pace and time. You will
be enabled to process the contents of the learning material while being an active
learner. Further, this also aims to help learners acquire the needed 21st century skills
especially the 5 Cs, namely: Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, Critical
Thinking, and Character while taking into consideration their needs and
circumstances.

Read the simple instructions below to successfully enjoy the objectives of this
self-learning material. Have fun!

1. Read the lessons with understanding and comprehension for you to easily grasp
the topics.
2. If you have any questions or topics that you cannot understand, do not hesitate to
ask your subject teacher.
3. Activity Notebook is required for answering the exercises.
4. Do not forget to answer the pre-assessment before moving on to the lesson proper
and other activities included in the module.
4. Read the directions carefully before doing each activity.
5. Observe honesty and integrity in doing the activities.
6. Review your answers before passing.
7. Always submit the activities on time.
8. Have fun in learning and answering your self-learning modules. It will be easier for
you to absorb all the learnings that you will acquire if you are enjoying what you are
doing.

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Knowing and Understanding Your Customers

If you encounter any difficulty in answering the tasks in this module, do not hesitate to
consult your teacher or facilitator. Always bear in mind that you are not alone. We hope
that through this material, you will experience meaningful learning and gain deep
understanding of the relevant competencies. You can do it!

PRE-ASSESSMENT

DIRECTIONS. Answer the following questions.

1. Why is it important to know who your customers are?

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2. Do you need to understand who your customers are? Explain your answer.

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OBJECTIVES

At the end of the self-learning material, you should be able to:

➢ Define who the customers are

➢ Learn to understand the customers’ point of views
➢ Analyze the different kinds of customers

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Knowing and Understanding Your Customers

LESSON 2.1 Who is your customer?

One fundamental question any business should be able to answer is, "Who do you
serve?" Everyone you serve is a customer. One misstep that some businesses make,
even very large ones, is not thoroughly and specifically identifying those they serve.
They cast a wide net and hope to benefit from "anything that sticks." In fact, many new
business owners often simply wish to attract whatever customers they can. While that
may seem logical, the reality is that the more clearly and specifically you can identify
a target group of those you wish to serve, the more successful you will be in connecting
with them and compelling them to some desired end result.

A customer is an individual or business that purchases another company's goods or

services. Customers are important because they drive revenues; without them,
businesses cannot continue to exist. All businesses compete with other companies to
attract customers, either by aggressively advertising their products, by lowering prices
to expand their customer bases, or by developing unique products and experiences
that customers love.

Defining your customers

Every business has different kinds of customers and they are divided into two
classifications:

1. Primary Customers
Your primary customers are your core value customers. These are your customers
who value what you offer and has willingness to pay for that. These are the customers
that are the actual users of your product.

Knowing who the core customers are will impact your sales in a positive manner but
not knowing your primary customers can result in a lot of problems like customer
turnover, unhappy customers, customers you lose money on, and limited growth and
profitability. To make sure you are clear who your core customers are, you must be
able to describe them as existing people - people you can get to know, develop a

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relationship with, form a mental picture of. You don’t sell your product or service to a
demographic; you sell it to a real person.

As a business owner, you must do the critical work to identify your primary customers
very carefully to fully understand them and fulfill their needs. Ultimately, you want to
delight these customers so that they become loyal customers. Just because someone
is a potential customer, doesn't mean that they will be profitable customer that will stay
in your customer base for years to come.

2. Secondary Customers
Secondary customers are the type of customers who don’t value the products a
business offers as much as the primary customers do. Nevertheless, they are still an
important part of the purchase decision.

Take this an example, non-working students who still depend on their parents or
guardians don’t have the means to buy expensive products like gadgets and branded
clothes. This is where the secondary customers, their parents or whomever provides
for them, come in. They may not be your primary customer but their existence is as
important as them.

ACTIVTY 2.1
How can you take care of your secondary customers?
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Knowing and Understanding Your Customers

Other kinds of customers

May it be a primary or a secondary customer, they can also be classified into these
groups:

New Customers – A customer is considered new the first time they buy one or more
of your products
Returning Customers – A returning customer is simply someone who has bought
your product or service once before and has returned to make another purchase. It is
the goal of any business to turn first-time customers into returning customers.
Lost Customers – Lost customers provide a unique customer perspective that is
facilitated by the fact that they no longer have a stake in the game and are usually
forthcoming about the issues they have with your products and services. In other
words, they are customers who are in the best position to provide this type of feedback.
Recovered Customers – They are the customers who were considered lost in a
previous time period.

ACTIVTY 2.2
IDENTIFICATION. Identify what kind of customers are mentioned below. For the first
line, identify if it is a primary or secondary customers then in the second line, choose
from new, returning, lost, and recovered customers.
__________, __________1. A father buying toys for his children again.
__________, __________2. A mother who can finally buy her favorite coffee again
after breastfeeding her baby.
__________, __________3. A teenage girl who is always willing to buy expensive K-
Pop albums.
__________, __________4. A first-time mom buying clothes for her twins.
__________, __________5. An older sister who once bought a car.

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LESSON 2.2 Understanding your customer

Understanding customers is the key to giving them good service. To give good
customer care you must deliver what you promise. But great customer care involves
getting to know your customers so well that you can anticipate their needs and exceed
their expectations.

To understand your customers well, you need to be attentive to them whenever you
are in contact with them. The potential rewards are great: you can increase customer
loyalty and bring in new business through positive word-of-mouth recommendation.

There are three main ways to understand your customers better:

1. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes

Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes means you are trying to look from their point
of view. You need to look at some certain points of your business that have contact
with your customers. These include your website or social media accounts, phone
calls, messages, and emails as well as meetings, visits and deliveries. Do your
premises look scruffy? Are your staff unfriendly? Do inquiries from messages go
unanswered? Or is it hard to navigate your website? These concerns are just few of
the things that can either make or break the relationship between the business and
the customers.

Once you have looked your business from a customers’ perspective, you will now see
what points of your business can affect its relationship with your customer. Through
these, you can improve and develop your business and offer more satisfaction to your
customers.

2. Build Personas from Data

Beyond employing empathy to understand your clients, deepen your connection by
building personas from the data you collect. You need enough data to resonate

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emotionally, so look at the terms that clients are utilizing to reach out to you. How do
clients describe your service? Now, build a persona from this information.

3. Simply to ask them what they think.

Conducting a customer satisfaction survey will make your customers feel valued. You
will also gain valuable insights. But don't ask for feedback if you're not prepared to
make changes. When you do make improvements, tell your customers what you have
done as a result of their feedback.

Well-compiled customer surveys can tell you things you may not know, including
human factors such as staff behavior. Not everyone complains when they are
dissatisfied. Instead, they tell their friends about their bad experience and take their
business elsewhere. Unless you proactively consult your customers, you may never
discover where you are going wrong.

A good customer contact strategy will allow you to listen to your customers and tell
them more about what you offer. The key to being able to effectively create new, and
desired options for consumers is a thorough understanding of who you serve and what
they value, as well as the identification or anticipation of problems that your product or
service solution might help to solve. As the old proverb goes, “Necessity is the mother
of invention.”

ACTIVTY 2.3
DIRECTIONS. How can you apply or relate the old proverb “Necessity is the mother
of invention.” in understanding the customers’ needs today?
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ASSESSMENT
DIRECTIONS: Answer the following questions below
Assume that you are the owner of a newly built coffee shop here in Guimba.

1. How will you attract new customers?

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2. How will you make your new customers come back to your shop?

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3. One year has passed and your coffee shop is still running well. But even so, you
know that you have lost some customers. What can you do about this type of
customers?

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4. What do you think is the cost of these lost customers?

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5. How will you develop your relationship with your recovered customers?

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Knowing and Understanding Your Customers

REFERENCE

Book:
The Everything Guide to Customer Engagement. Linda Pophal.
Adams Media.
Website:

Customer. Investopedia.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/customer.asp

Understanding your customers. Marketing Donut.

https://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/customer-care/understanding-your-
customers/understanding-your-customers-overview

10 Key Principles for Truly Understanding Your Clients. William Craig.

https://www.helpscout.com/blog/customer-relations/

What is the Difference Between a Primary Customer and Secondary Customer?

Alan Gehringer. https://www.rhythmsystems.com/blog/what-is-the-difference-
between-a-primary-and-secondary-core-customer

Lost Customers. Brandon Hickie. https://openviewpartners.com/blog/lost-customer-

research-what-and-when-necessary/#.YUwV1bgzbIU

New and returning customers. DAX Patterns. https://www.daxpatterns.com/new-

and-returning-customers/

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