Competition and Customer Loyalty

It takes about 20 times more energy to get a new customer as you will need to keep one you already have.  To keep a customer is to treat him with a measure of quality and excellence.  Whether the customer is an individual or organizational buyer, they all have expectations of the firm they deal with.  The basic determinant of whether they will become loyal to that firm or to a competitor is premised on whether those expectations are met or not.  This discourse is targeted at helping the participating firms to meet and exceed their customers/clients’ expectations.

The Effect of Competition

Who is a competitor?  Someone who produces and/or sells similar products to yours is your competitor.  All such companies involved in similar trade are in competition.  You are all in competition for the customers’ money; striving, trying to outperform one another, etc; but the choice of who to stay with, is the call of the customers to make, but you can help them.  Never let your competition shows your customer a better product than yours!  Do you want to avoid losing your clients to your competitors?  Then help them avoid seeing a better product in your competitor’s.  How?  Make your product the best in the market.  The same principle applies to both new and existing products/sellers in the market.  There are key areas you must focus on to keep your customers.  These will be examined shortly.

Why Customers Quit

1% die

3% move away

5% other friendships

9% competitive reasons (price)

14% product dissatisfaction, but

68% quit because of an attitude of indifference towards them by some employee.

A research conducted by Stanford University revealed that, money made in any endeavour is only 12.5% by knowledge, and 87.5% by your ability to deal with people.  John D. Rockefeller said, “I will pay more for the ability to deal with people than any other ability under the sun”.  Besides several other factors that could take your customers away and give them cheaply to your competitors, the attitude of your employee, or people who relate with customers matter the most.  Customers consider themselves your most priced assets, and they want to be treated as such.  Anything short of this, meets with a beckoning from competitors.

The single most important ingredient to the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people.  Always realize that, any activity you engage in is capable of being a benchmark with which customers evaluate you, particularly in the earliest stages of their contact with you.  That is the customer’s privilege, not yours.

Do you want to have an edge over your competitors with regards to the battle for customers, then have an edge first, with your company attitude.  The customer has no business differentiating one person from another in your firm, every singular misbehavior by any one is seen as company misbehavior.  Customers don’t even see their own wrong, the company must just have a perfect attitude.