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Customer Care Corner
2nd Article by Director of Customer 1st Caribbean Limited.
Ms. A. Nathudkhan
Keeping up with your customers no matter how often they change
Customers are people- unpredictable, irrational, emotional, curious and highly prone to change. Customers can’t keep still. Their priorities change like the wind.
They get better informed, they get more demanding. One day they decide to buy online, the next they don’t, they want bigger cars, then they want smaller, then really bigger, then they decide they value fuel efficiency and ecological virtue after all. They want carbohydrates, then they don’t, they want fibre, bottled water, then they don’t. It never ends, because people are both predictable and unpredictable. They like, then they don’t like!
Every time your customer focus changes business is affected, your business is at risk.
I am not going to pour out a load of technical business jargon here, these articles are meant for everyone and to help all those who have customers, want to keep customers and want to create new customers.
Bottom line is you have to be very aware of the changing needs of your customers, and minimise your risk.
The way to minimise your risk is by adopting a very proactive approach to risk in the first place. After all, that’s what risk is about –not knowing what’s going to happen, what your customers are thinking, what they want, what will they do, what will they respond to. If you could know those things, you could and should react appropriately; and you would be saving valuable time effort and money.
You have to move from guessing to knowing, shifting the information factor from what you know to what you don’t know. Risk my dear readers at the end of the day is just a very expensive substitute for information!
Try putting simple systems in place to acquire the information you need from your customers. For example
· Create questionnaires that capture enough information about your customers (Keep it simple)
· Don’t get complacent with faithful customers –Ask them questions
· Use mystery shoppers
· Use the information!!!
Anyone in business will tell you that customers at the end of the day are fickle and unpredictable, how often do you need to stay abreast of what customers want, bluntly put all the time 24/7.
Knowledge is power as they say, and in the case of customer retention knowledge is the key.
In our next article we will discuss creating a customer-centred culture from home.
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