Are you out of touch?

How do you know when you have lost contact?

I must make a confession to you; I have been overwhelmed in the past three weeks and have not made any blog posts in that time.  The combination of consulting for clients and writing white papers for my company have sucked up all my free time.  Those reasons are not excuses; I need to plan my blog better and store posts to be used as needed.  Building a blog backlog is one of my key blog objectives for this year.

My “quiet period” made me think (always a dangerous thing).  If you have been in contact with your Best Customers in the past, how do you keep that contact going over time, with everything else going on?  Or do you find yourself like I do today, catching up after a down time, scrambling to write about all the lessons and issues I have discovered over the past three weeks?

One of the painful lessons of a declining content rate is a declining visit rate as well.  I have made sure to keep examining the Google Analytics page and seeing the decreasing number of new visitors and page views, in order to motivate myself to get “back in the saddle.”  It made me think about the metrics you can study to measure customer engagement, particularly of Best Customers.

Metrics like change in frequency, change in contacts and reduced depth of purchase (range of products purchased in a visit or a timeperiod) — they all can provide evidence that the relationship is becoming more one-sided and that the customer feels like they have to do all the work.  But the only way to make sure that those metrics spur you to action is to be able to see them on a regular basis.

Do you track Best Customer behavior on a monthly basis?  What other metrics indicate to you that you might be losing contact with critical customers?

Glad to be back at it.  More coming soon, including a 5-part series on checklists.

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Tagged as: best customers, Customer, customer metrics, Google Analytics, metrics, White paper