From risk takers to risk shapers

“Customer risk is the most subtle and perhaps the most widespread strategic risk that any company faces. It’s also the most unnecessary”, argues Lisa Haneberg from an article by Adrian Slywotzky, the author of the bestselling The Profit Zone (selected by BusinessWeek as one of the ten best books of 1998), Value Migration, and How to Grow When Markets Don’t..

How can you take action to prevent customer risk? You can’t force people to buy from you. As Yogi Berra once said, "If the people don’t want to come to the ballpark, you can’t stop them."

No, you can’t, but you can reduce the risk of losing customers by reducing the uncertainty that creates the risk in the first place. After all, that’s what risk is about—not knowing what’s going to happen, what your customers are thinking, what they want, what they will do, what will they respond to. If you could know those things, you could react appropriately with the kinds of pricing, marketing, and service offerings that would motivate them to stay.

This is why the first countermeasure for defeating customer risk is creating and applying continuous proprietary information about your customers. It’s about answering the question: What do we know about customers that others don’t? And then using that knowledge to make and keep profitable customers for life.

Very intuitive article. I found it a bit late though, as usual.

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