A Customer

Last Updated: August 19, 2010By Tags: ,

Sam Walton founder of Wal-Mart nicely describes A Customer…

  • A customer is the most important person in any business
  • A customer is not dependent upon us. We are dependent upon him/her.
  • A customer is not an interruption of our work. He/she is the sole purpose of it.
  • A customer does us a favor when he comes in. We aren’t doing him a favor by waiting on him/her.
  • A customer is an essential part of our business–not an outsider.
  • A customer is not just money in the cash register. He/she is a human being with feelings and deserves to be treated with respect.
  • A customer is a person who comes to us with needs and wants. It is our job to fill them.
  • A customer deserves the most courteous attention we can give him/her. He/she is the lifeblood of this and every business. He/she pays your salary. Without him we would have to close our doors. Don’t ever forget it.

Sometimes in this busy world we forget the very basics of doing business… Customers the most important to us marketers.  Companies seeking to grow their sales and profits must spend considerable time and resources searching for new customers. Customer acquisition requires substantial skills in lead generation, lead qualification, and account conversion. The company can use ads, Web pages, SEO, direct mail, telemarketing, and personal selling to generate leads and produce a list of suspects. The next task is to qualify the suspects as prospects, rank them in priority order, and initiate sales activities to convert prospects into customers. After they are acquired, however, some of these customers will not be retained.

Unfortunately, most marketing professionals focus on the art of attracting new customers rather than on retaining existing ones.

The key to customer retention is customer satisfaction. A highly satisfied customer stays loyal longer, buys more, talks favorably about the company and its products, pays less attention to competitors, is less price-sensitive, offers product or service ideas, and costs less to serve than new customers because transactions are routinized.

Striking the right chord to keep customers happy is the holy grail.

Chintan Bharwada

Chintan is the Founder and Editor of Loyalty & Customers.

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To achieve better sales and profits, most companies could be doing more to cultivate business from their existing customers. However, enthusiasm for customer-retaining strategies must not endanger sound customer-getting efforts. How companies balance the two is the big question. To intensify reaching old customers while still seeking new ones, for many firms, will mean changes in market analysis, planning systems, management incentives, and marketing and/or operations organization. In the rush toward growth, consumer marketers have tended to regard success as stemming from obtaining new customers while unwittingly minimizing the importance of satisfying old ones. It is time for more companies to distinguish between their getting and retaining functions, to assess the balance between them, and to remedy any deficiencies in customer retention. This process requires management to value the potential of current customers and to treat them in special ways to get them to keep coming back. Several major elements should be part of the new marketing mix for customer retention: Product extras Keeping customers frequently requires giving them more than the basic product that initially attracted them. Product extras for individual customers over time can play a sales-expansive role. Reinforcing promotions Product promotion works better when aimed at existing customers. If a marketer knows who these customers are, benefits can be obtained by giving them reinforcing communications. Sales force connections The sales force can play a decisive role in the customer-retention function. At a retail or service counter the salesperson is the focal point of the company's strategy and is the firm to the customer. Post-purchase communication A company must anticipate that some customers will encounter either minor or serious problems after purchasing. If the firm is not ready to hear and correct these difficulties, the customer may not repurchase  or may cancel the the relationship. Whether company or customer is at fault, standby post-purchase activities can be instrumental in saving these customers.

8 Comments

  1. Nimish January 16, 2010 at 2:11 am

    These words which you attribute to Sam Walton were actually spoken by Mahatma Gandhi.

    • Chintan Bharwada January 19, 2010 at 8:07 pm

      Agreed…. but made popular by Sam…

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