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    Where are your customers coming from?

    March 1, 2002
    GSE Business Focus

    Where Are Your Customers Coming From?

    In today's market, businesses need to add new ways to find and keep customers in order to remain profitable, writes Michelle Garetson

    By Michelle Garetson

    March 2002

    Finding new customers is a goal for any business trying to remain successful. Unfortunately, many companies keep looking in the same places and become worried when fewer, newer customers materialize. The global economy has taken its share of twists and turns in the last 18 months with business mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcies and it’s difficult to know who will remain, and in what form, when the market rights itself again. Customers of those businesses will be just as anxious to know who is still a going concern as well as who is simply, going.

    MARKET RESEARCH PAYS OFFThe savvy business knows that paying attention to the marketplace is important because it identifies competitors, their products and services, as well as a variety of approaches used to gain new business. Keen market research also identifies those companies in trouble and that may be liquidating in the near term. This is the opportunity for the creative and alert company to contact the closing competitor and ask about what they have planned for their existing customer base. An offer to do a mailing to the former competitor’s customer base explaining the business closing and introducing your company may help to bridge that uncomfortable gap for both companies.

    Arrangements could also be made to have the former competitor’s phone calls forwarded to your place of business. While this may sound predatory, it could work in everyone’s favor if handled correctly. The former business leaves gracefully, the former customers continue to receive goods and services, and the new company has gained new customers. All you have to do is ask. All the troubled business can say is,

    CUSTOMER APPRECIATION
    Good customer service cannot be overstated as the key to finding and keeping your customers. Think of your own buying experiences. What made that transaction great? Or, what made it so horrible that you would never go back? Was it product knowledge, or lack thereof? Was it a pleasant and helpful employee? Was it a thank you letter for your patronage?

    People want to be served, not sold, and they need to feel appreciated. New customers, and especially current and long-term customers, need continuous reinforcement that their custom is important. Customer feedback should be solicited at every opportunity and implemented, if appropriate. It’s difficult enough to find customers, but it can be even harder to keep them if they are treated as an account number, rather than a valued account. GSE

    UNHAPPY CUSTOMERS ARE EXPENSIVE
    Did you know...
         • The average business does not hear from 96-percent of its unhappy customers?
         • When a customer is happy about his experience, he tells an average of eight friends; when he is unhappy, he tells 16 of them.
         • Between 65- and 90-percent of your unhappy customers will not buy from you again and you will never know why.
         • It costs on average five times as much to get a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.

    From TARP (Technical Assistance Research Programs) in Arlington, Virginia. www.tarp.com.