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Customer Relationship Management - System or Attitude?

A colleague recently lamented to me "I was so annoyed that the XYZ coffee shop in the ABC Centre took sooooo long to give me a second coffee one morning, even though I was close to the machine and kept looking expectantly, I decided to ‘punish' them by going elsewhere for a year.

At an average of three coffees a day @ $3.20 each = $9.60 a day for about 220 working days a year, that could cost them $2,112 a year. (That's why my new office now has a cappuccino machine!!) Given that I was traveling a fair bit, I figured their poor service cost them at least $800 to $900 for the year that I gave them a miss."

Do you know how much business each individual customer brings you? More importantly, do your front line staff know? I wonder what impact it would have on the staff at this coffee shop if they knew that every regular customer had the potential to bring them at least $2,000 gross revenue each year. Do the staff know how many "regular" customers they have per day? And, what does it take to turn a "drop in" or "first timer" into a regular customer?

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Who is your customer?

Who is your customer?

To any savvy business manager, that may seem a simple or even silly question. "Of course I know who my customers are, I wouldn't be in business otherwise" might be the natural response. However, one organisation who recently got this drastically (and what could have been tragically) wrong, and which almost crippled an entire country (well at least for a couple of weeks), was the US Federal Aviation Administration.

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It's been said that your first time customer, even your first time visitor (say to your website) is always the highest cost to you. But it's the repeat customers and visitors that really provide the best returns.

I had an email from a colleague recently telling me about his latest service experience.

*I was so annoyed that the XYZ coffee shop in the ABC Centre took sooooo long to give me a second coffee one morning, even though I was close to the machine and kept looking expectantly, I decided to ‘punish' them by going elsewhere for a year.

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Service with a smile!

There have been a couple of interesting service stories in the press over the last week. Getting front line staff to provide excellent, even good customer service seems to be the perennial management challenge. This appears even more challenging when times are tough and businesses are scrambling for that extra sale.

What are the latest attempts at meeting this challenge?

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Buying should be an experience, not merely a purchase.

How do most of your customers enter your business? Through the front door? By phone? Via the web? By email? Chances are some of your business comes to you by email. Or If it doesn't initially, it's a fair bet that you will have email contact with many of your customers during their relationship with you.

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