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Are You Giving Your Best Customers Your Best?

Your best customers may spend 10x more and cost a fraction as much to serve, yet receive an experience barely different from anyone else. Why retention of your best customers is the highest-return marketing strategy available to you.

Over the past three articles, I've focused on why customer intelligence needs to be elevated as a strategic capability, why best customer understanding should be a focus of that customer intelligence, and how to improve how you listen to these customers.

Here's the final question in this series: now that you know who your best customers are, and you're listening to them more carefully, are you giving them your best, differentiated offering across all your most important touchpoints?

If you aren't sure, it's time to prioritize finding out.

In this article

• Why best customer strategy is a retention business case, not a short-term growth case
• What the experience gap looks like, and why "Platinum Tier" emails don't do enough to close it
• A five-step playbook for closing the gap this week

The experience gap nobody talks about

Your best customers are extremely different from your average ones. They may spend 10× more, stay three times longer, buy more breadth of your offering, and cost a fraction as much to serve, making them exponentially more profitable. Research from Smile.io, analyzing data across more than 100,000 merchants, found that the top 8% of customers generate 41% of revenue, and the top 5% generate 35%. The concentration of profit can be even greater.

But if you take a walk through your website, call center, loyalty program, digital advertising, or marketing emails as one of those customers, you might be hard-pressed to see a unique experience. They may sit in a best customer tier with customers who spend ten times less than them, get the same service resolutions, and receive the same high frequency promotional email diet as everyone else. In fact, sometimes these customers end up receiving more emails than everyone else because of their high engagement. Their reward for this high engagement from most brands is more email. Additionally, website experiences are rarely meaningfully personalized for best customers.

The best customer is dramatically differentiated from the average one, but the experience for that customer is barely differentiated at all.

I can already hear the objections: "but we have a best customer program, we personalize the emails with 'Platinum Tier,' and the site says 'Welcome back, valued customer!'" But really put yourself in their shoes and walk those experiences. Do you genuinely feel special? Does it feel like the red carpet has been rolled out for you?

The business case for getting this right

Here's a common error I've seen in how Marketing leaders build business cases and evaluate best customer objectives: they treat best customer strategy as a growth initiative, and develop KPIs and tactics to up-sell or cross-sell to get more out of these customers.

That's the wrong framing. Best customers are likely already near their natural spending ceiling with you. They buy when they need to, at the frequency that makes sense for them. Squeezing incremental spend from them has low marginal returns. And over-communication can drive these customers away. This is like taking a group that's already in the 99th percentile and asking: can we push them even further right on the distribution?

A better framing is understanding the risk and cost of losing a best customer. This principle has been validated consistently for decades. Bain & Company first established the financial case in Harvard Business Review in 1990, and the economics have only become more compelling as customer acquisition costs have risen. A 5% improvement in customer retention can boost profits by 25 to 95%. Why? Because losing customers cuts off the future LTV (life-time value), and customer profitability increases as their tenure increases. Best customers have even greater profit potential that is lost when they switch brands. A best customer lost is extraordinarily expensive to replace, whether by new acquisition or win back.

The goal of a best customer strategy isn't to maximize what you get from them. It's to make sure they never have a reason to look elsewhere.

What great customer experience actually looks like

Think about a local business you've been a loyal patron of for years: a restaurant, a coffee shop, a dry cleaner. If you show up week after week, something starts to happen. They learn your name, your preferences, maybe even your special occasions. You don't have to explain your usual order. There's a warmth and ease to the experience that reflects the relationship you've built. They do this instinctively, as a value exchange for your continued loyalty.

Now imagine going back next week and being treated like a stranger. Same product. Same service. But no recognition, no familiarity, no signal that they know who you are. The experience would feel flat. And for the first time, you might start to wonder whether you're as valued as you thought.

That's exactly how your best customers feel when your brand doesn't recognize them and differentiate their experience: unseen and undervalued.

The challenge for large companies isn't imagining what a great customer experience looks like, it's recreating that small-business intimacy at scale. The good news: you don't need to solve that problem all at once. A good two-hour CX brainstorming session, with your customer intelligence and CX experts present, will surface multiple areas of friction and opportunity. Ideas I've seen come out of these sessions include:

• Early access to products, events, or major promotion calendars.
• A dedicated customer service line.
• Meaningful acknowledgment, such as an invitation to a Customer Advisory Board or an exclusive research survey for best customers.
• Differentiated service recovery when something goes wrong.
• Surprise-and-delight moments timed to loyalty milestones.

Watch carefully for intent as you ideate here. Don't fall into the best customer exploitation trap. The goal is not to maximize value from these customers in their next transaction. The goal is to make your best customers feel seen, valued, and rewarded. Don't forget to ideate on exclusive experiences or rewards that only your brand (or your partners) can provide.

The Five-One Playbook (five steps, one week)

Before you choose a tactic, do the empathy work. Put yourself in your best customer's shoes. Not as a marketer, but as them. What does it feel like to be your best customer today? Here's a framework for finding out and acting on it quickly.

1. Set a primary metric. Define the single KPI that matters most for your best customer segment. Long term retention rate (at least 3 months out depending on typical order history) is a good one. Before you start, make sure you know what revenue and/or profit a one percent improvement in that rate represents. This will help secure prioritization or funding decisions. Pick one, own it, and build your experiments around it.
2. Walk their entire journey. With the mindset of your best customer, go through your website, your marketing emails, your loyalty program, and your customer service experience. Not from the inside looking out, but from the outside looking in. What does it actually feel like? If this exercise is daunting or time-consuming, ask your internal CX team or external agency to audit this for you and provide a report, but make sure it includes concrete, visual examples of the experience so you can truly feel what it's like.
3. Find the gap. Where does the experience feel generic? Where are best customers being treated just like any other customer? Where are there parts of the journey where you'd want a special experience if you were a great customer? Those are your highest-priority opportunities.
4. Ideate for customer utility, not business goals. Bring your team together and ask one question: what would make our best customers feel genuinely seen and valued? Not what do we want them to do next, but what do they deserve? The tactics will surface naturally from the right starting point.
5. Run one experiment, and give it time. Test your best idea on a subset of your best customers. Retention is a long game; you won't see meaningful signal in the first month. If the investment is material, make sure your CEO and CFO are aligned on the timeline before you start. Mitigate risk by running it with a portion of the segment first. ROI is attainable, but don't count on it showing up immediately.

Closing the loop

This closes the customer strategy series. Across these four articles, I've covered why customer intelligence deserves a strategic seat at your table, how to identify your best customers and build a deliberate strategy around them, how to make sure your VoC program is listening to the right voices, and how to make sure those customers are getting something valuable in return.

The thread running through all of it is simple: companies that understand their best customers deeply, listen to them deliberately, and serve them intentionally are the ones building a compounding advantage.

Most companies compete for the average customer. Your best customers are the path to both higher customer satisfaction and profit growth.

Next up: I'm turning my attention to a topic I've navigated for years: the strategy, architecture, and organizational dynamics of marketing technology. If customer data is the foundation of your customer strategy, marketing technology is how that strategy gets articulated and shows up for your customers. A sub-optimal marketing technology capability is a constraint to your growth strategy, so it must have adequate attention and investment.