Value Customers by Serving Them Well

Customers are one of a business’ most valuable assets. The money that customers spend in a store is what enables owners to buy products, pay the bills, pay employees’ wages, and ultimately find success instead of failure.

An old business adage states, “If you don’t take care of your customers, someone else will.” It has proved itself to be true over and over again. Customers have dozens of options available to them today. Virtually every business has competitors; thus, every customer has choices or substitute sources for the solutions he or she seeks.

In order to take care of customers, you need to have a full understanding of your customers’ wants, needs, preferences, and desires. And you must work to ensure that each and every first-time customer becomes a second-time and third-time customer. Unless customers achieve satisfaction from the purchase and use of your business’ product or service, they may be unlikely to buy from your business again. Thus, in order to retain customers, you must develop customer loyalty—you must do those things that keep the customer coming back time and time again. This perspective on customer service should encourage you to think beyond the normal activities involved in the sales cycle. Post-purchase activities that become important include repairs, routine maintenance, trade-ins, and re-sales.

So, how can you keep customers coming back? Practice simple principles that show each customer that he or she is important to the business.

• When a customer comes into the store, acknowledge him immediately. Approach him with a friendly smile, and introduce yourself with a handshake or other physical gesture that is appropriate in the culture.

• Take an active approach to selling. Instead of asking, “May I help you?” ask a question that gives you an opportunity to share information about your store, your merchandise, or whatever differentiates you from other stores. An example of such a question is, “Have you been in our store before?”

• Give as much attention to customers as they need, but give customers time to browse if they seem interested in just looking at the merchandise and taking their own time.

Of course, different customers will want different things from you in terms of customer service. If you truly recognize how important customers are to your business, you will do whatever is needed to make them happy. Good customer service is always worth the effort.

Value Customers by Analyzing Their Financial Value

Research has shown that finding a new customer costs a lot more than keeping an existing customer. Thus, wise business owners spend most of their customer-related time and energy building and maintaining good relationships with their current customers so they can keep them for the long term.

Regardless of what business you are in, you can grow your revenues in only three ways:
(1) increase the number of customers, (2) persuade current customers to buy in larger volumes, and (3) encourage current customers to buy products more often. Regardless of which business-growing tactic you decide to pursue, you must realize that pursuing any of the strategies must start with an understanding of how financially valuable each customer is to the business’ bottom line.

If your business has 10,000 pesos of revenue each week and has a regular customer base of 50 pesos, then each customer has a financial value of 200 pesos per week. If you want to increase sales, you must either take care of those customers and persuade them to buy more from you, or you must get new customers. If you want to double your revenue, you need to double the amount of each customer’s purchases or double the number of regular customers. The path you pursue is largely dependent on your personality and ability to attract new business. But it all must start with an understanding of how much each customer is worth financially to the business.