All businesses have natural customer attrition. People change their minds, move away or die! You want marketing machinery in place to constantly grow your customer base, retain and grow your best customers.
It costs typically 4 to 9 times more to find new customers than to keep existing customers. Develop a compelling customer service proposition to ensure you retain ‘the right’ customers and build mutually beneficial customer relationships. By practicing smart marketing in all your communications you truly become the only natural choice supplier for your best customers.
You want to be in a position of creating astonishing service. You want to be able to delight your customers. Just like any mutually beneficial relationship this takes ongoing meaningful contact, discernment and creativity. Meaningful contact can be achieved by educating and informing your customers on an ongoing basis. Regular newsletters can be a great way to achieve this. By encouraging your customers to opt-in to your postal or email newsletter you are ensuring they are happy to receive information from you. You can keep them up to date with changes and trends in the market place.
Information might include political, economical, social, technological, environmental or legal issues. You can help your customers make ongoing intelligent buying decisions by informing them of all the critical factors that should be in place from a quality supplier. This might include for example, standards of service, after sales care, health and safety issues and guarantees.
It is not feasible to try to serve all your customers with awesome service. You can achieve it however, for a select group of customers. So how do you choose which customers to serve best? You start by segmenting your existing customer base and rank them in to categories. Your criteria might include for example, their ongoing needs, profitability levels, accessibility, affordability, willingness to pay and servicing demands. This exercise will probably leave you with approximately 20% of your customer base in the top categories.
The next step is to seek to serve the demands of your best customers as a priority. For the lower categories of customer you can deal with them more on a reactive basis and possibly even refer them to another business. By developing strategic alliance partnerships with other good businesses you are able to maintain an income stream from work you are not necessarily fulfilling directly.
You can continue to offer creative solutions by making the appropriate offers available to the right customers. Customer knowledge is vital. You can combine solutions as part of a packaged bundle of products and services. You can offer add-on buying opportunities. An example for a cleaning business might be a half-price cleaning of the hallway and landing carpet while you are there cleaning the living room carpet.
You can also build customer loyalty with membership programmes and loyalty schemes. For example they may pay an ongoing nominal fee which entitles them to special member privileges and discounts.
The best way to obtain information about your customers’ needs, wants and preferences is to ask them. Get them to tell you what they want and within reason give it to them. Customer feedback surveys are very helpful.
Finally, be credible, be remarkable and be fun to deal with.
How to Deliver the Ultimate in Customer Service Delight - To learn more about this author, visit Brian James's Website.
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