Small Business - A Recession Strategy in 7 Steps For Retaining New Customers
1. Provide A Reason To Come Back To You
You don’t know why some individual or company uses your product or service for the first time. You do know that they’re more likely to use it again if you make their first experience positive, satisfying and memorable. Create that experience.
2. Obtain Their Details
If yours is a “business to business” operation, this should be a simple task. If you run a retail store it can be at least awkward or even difficult.
Many individuals are reluctant to simply provide personal details. That’s OK. You could offer a special bonus or gift redeemable next time they use you. Make sure any bonus has high perceived value to the customer. And use a coupon that looks professional and articulates your offer professionally and clearly.
How Shopkeepers Can Unite and Provide Discounts to Loyal Customers
Many retailers and shopkeepers are quite receptive to the idea of uniting, and working together to provide discounts to their shared customers. Shopkeepers are beginning to realize that this is the only way for them to compete with bigger retail chains opening up all across the nation. The problem is however, that most shopkeepers simply do not know how to go about doing this. There is a very simple solution however, and one that has already proven to be effective. That solution is a rewards program.
Many credit cards companies and bank issued debit cards are now offering rewards programs to their users. This usually works by rewarding you with points for every dollar you spend using that particular credit or debit card. Points can later be redeemed online for great prizes; anything from gift certificates, frequent flyer miles, hotel room stays, car rentals, even high end electronics, vacations and in some cases, cash back is even offered as a reward. And as a result of implanting such reward programs, credit and debit card companies alike have seen an increase in card usage like never before.
This is an ideal solution for shopkeepers and local retailers to unite, work together, and provide their customers with discounts. By creating some kind of card to distribute to their customers, shopkeepers can keep track of purchases not only at their stores but any “partner” establishments as well. And as you can see, any number of prizes or rewards can be offered in exchange for loyal service.
The Customer Isn’t Always No. 1
Customers expect small businesses to provide the best customer service. However, by holding on to the old customer service strategy that the customer is No. 1, many small businesses have failed potentially loyal customers and watched their sales stagnate, retention erode, and repeat business dwindle. What small businesses need is a fresh approach. They need to realize that it’s their own employees who should be treated as No. 1.
Who knows how to handle customers better than your frontline employees? They regularly see and hear customer complaints and, if you listen to them, they usually have the best solutions.
To deliver a world-class customer service experience, businesses need to build their approach and strategies around those who execute it. It can be as simple as listening to employee suggestions and incorporating them into the larger picture. If you want to take it a step further, give them the power to think independently to instantly solve customer problems.
Customers, Nothing Else Matters
It doesn’t matter how well you know the whats if what you really need is to know the whys. And the gap between knowledge and comprehension is never greater than in business when you need to be able to answer the really important questions – those that test your fundamental empathy with your customers. Knowing who they are and where you’ll find them is one thing, but will you really be able to serve them successfully - and therefore profitably – if you don’t truly know what makes them tick, what they really need, and why.
It’s an issue that’s been highlighted countless times since the Investor in Customers (IIC) standard was introduced in 2006, because we’ve been asking customers exactly what they think of the businesses we’ve assessed. In fact ‘countless’ is probably the wrong word, because we have been counting – and now we have been able to conduct a study into the results of 25 corporate assessments, involving more than 6,000 customer and staff feedback questionnaires. It’s a rich seam of knowledge, and while confidentiality rules preclude the use of specific names or identifiable details, it’s knowledge that is powerful in its generic similarities.
The assessments cover businesses across a number of sectors, namely financial services, marketing, PR, IT, recruitment, outsourcing, FMCG and supply chain. Different as those businesses are, they are all assessed under the four guiding principles of the IIC:
Building Partnerships: Identifies Partnership Needs
Analyzes the organization and own area to identify key relationships that should be initiated or improved to further the attainment of own area’s goals.
Competition today means getting to the finish line first with better products and services. What is good enough today most likely won’t be good enough tomorrow. Even if you’re meeting your objectives, don’t get complacent.
You could probably find small ways to improve your team’s operating procedures, but chances are your work area isn’t responsible for the total process. Whether you are producing a product, rendering a service, completing a project, or implementing an improvement idea, people outside your work area are going to be involved in what’s going on. Partnerships force you to consider how your work area and organization fit into the larger business process. They broaden your outlook and help you see how to make a major leap forward.
An organization is like a link in a value chain that connects the seller of raw materials or ideas to the end-user of finished products and services. An organization receives products or services from suppliers, adds its unique value, and then provides enhanced products or services to its customers. The customers add their unique value and supply even more enhanced products and services to customers one step closer to the end-user.
8 Ways to Get More From Your Existing Customers
For many of us - especially those in service businesses - our existing and previous customers are vital for three reasons:
1. They have already bought from us, so providing they had a good experience, they might buy from us again. We also know that getting a new customer is much more expensive than selling to an existing customer, so by continuing to sell to them, we are really saving ourselves some money.
2. They can give us invaluable feedback on how we did. Was our service good enough? Did we delight them or were we ‘just ok’. Did our product meet their expectations? Was it good value for money? And so on.
3. They continue to save us money because they should be our major source of referrals and new business. So through them, we get access to new clients who already know about us and have a positive opinion of what we do.
Most clients I meet are not leveraging their existing customer database, and by not doing so, are losing out on a cost effective source of potential new business. Many receive referrals - for which they are grateful - but it’s not because they actively sought the referral, or had a strategy in place to ask for it.
Here are 8 ways to maximize the value from your most valuable asset:
Delight your Clients
Anyone with half a brain can satisfy a customer. But only when you continually delight customers will they keep coming back. You should aim to exceed your customers expectations on every interaction that they have with you. Do this consistently, and you will have a customer for life.
Creating a Vision and Mission
For any business to succeed, it must know what it is about. It must be able to clearly describe why it is there, and what it is there to achieve. Developing a vision and mission statement is a way of articulating these ideas to yourself, your customers, your employees, and to the world at large.
A Business Vision that Inspires!
If you don’t know where you are heading, then you can make any choice and go in any direction (including backwards). The value in knowing your final destination (your vision) is that you can choose to take the specific paths that lead you there. Your action is intentional and keeps you pointed in the right direction.
Vision statements can take many forms. They answer the question: “What will success look like?” Their main purpose is to articulate the “dream” state of the business. If your business could be everything you dreamed, how would it be? To help you to craft your vision statement, try writing your answers to the following questions:
· Why did I start this business?
· When I move on from this business, what do I want to leave behind?