Now more than ever it is time to take good care of your customer. New customers are hard to come these days, and any lost customer will be much harder to replace.
A great example of the right way to treat customers comes from my wife's cousin Ted and his wife Sally. They own a grocery store in a small town in Wisconsin.
Over the past few months they have seen a strong increase in sales. It seems that with higher gas prices people have not been as willing to travel to nearby larger cities to shop at the larger chain and big box grocery stores.
They are not taking this windfall of new business for granted, however. They are doing everything they can to retain these new customers and turn them into loyal "regulars" in their store, through great service and by creating good value.
A very wise lesson for all of us in these difficult economic times.
Excellent idea and one that many businesses will be focusing on.
Indeed...Taking good care of customers in times of financial distress is critical to nurturing future customer loyalty. I think that this is almost common sense for companies with some sense of customer satisfaction priorities, however I have experienced that the reality is quite the opposite.
I actually got approached recently by our Vacation Club asking for a premium contribution this year. They explained that the tougher economic situation the country was going through was not secret to anyone and also the basis of their request. I was extremely upset and although I don't have any other option than paying it, I wrote to the management expressing my disappointment: it is especially because these are hard economic times that additional pressure should not be put in customers, and definitely should not be an opportunity to take advantage and use it as a “pitch” to bring in extra income.