You’re busy!
It’s easy to find reasons to not spend enough time with customers. You’re extremely busy. You have other customers to serve as well. You can’t spend all your time with just one person.
There’s no getting around it. If you want to make a sale you need to keep the customer happy. If you want them coming back again and again, you have to give the customer as much of your time as they need. As far as prioritising other tasks, it’s just a matter of improving your productivity and time management so you have enough time to spend with customers. Yes the banking has to be done but guess what… if you have no customers, your book work problem will go away very quickly!
Your customers are not a distraction from your business, they’re the reason you have a business.
Who pays?
You have your own small business and it’s your only source of income. Have you ever considered who pays your weekly grocery bill? Who pays for your kids school fees? Who pays for you to go on family vacation? Your customers do! Without customers, you have no business and no income. Without customers, there’d be no admin to do. You’d never have to speak to your accountant. You’d never have to update your website or post on your business Facebook page. All of these tasks come second in importance to your valuable customers.
Have you ever calculated how much one customer is worth to you? Let’s say you own a coffee shop. Your loyal customers pay you for a coffee each weekday morning. They come in for breakfast most Saturdays with 3 of their friends. Once every couple of months they come in for a mid week lunch with a client. It might be easy to assume that one customer isn’t terribly valuable. It’s only $4 here, $20 there.
Let’s work it out.
$4 coffee each weekday for 48 weeks = $4 x 5 x 48 = $960
$20 breakfast x 4 people x 40 weeks = $20 x 4 x 40 = $3200
$30 lunch x 2 people every second month = $30 x 2 x 6 = $360
One year total = $4520
Your business has been in operation for 5 years = $4520 x 5 = $22,600
Wow! Is that worth spending a little extra time with that customer while she decides on what to have for lunch? Is it worth taking an extra few minutes to have a friendly chat before you go back into the office?
Today’s challenge is to work out the lifetime value of one of your customers taking into account the best possible scenario for repeat business and lifetime loyalty. Once you’ve done this exercise, consider how you can spend more time with your customers to achieve this best possible scenario with every one.
Loyalty is so valuable — it costs 6 to 7 times more to find a new customer than it does to keep a current one.