Many years ago, Mahatma Gandhi said “a customer is the most important visitor to our business premises, he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it.  We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so”

All businesses survive and prosper on the basis of their customer base, their share of the market. Customers or clients, however you choose to call them, are like oxygen to a business, as blood is to human life.  But attracting and retaining customers year in, year out is not a walk in the park.

As a research, capacity development and quality service delivery consulting company, dedicated to helping businesses, particularly SMEs to succeed and become profitable, Human Capital International brings you the five most important strategies to attract and retain customers in today’s competitive markets.

Never compromise on quality and excellence.

A satisfied customer is like a drug addict. He or she will always prefer your services or products to any other alternatives on the market. Quality and excellent delivery of service or products wins your business customer royalty and no matter what the competition does, your products or services will always stand out in the hearts and minds of your customers. This will invariably give you a competitive advantage on the market.

Embrace technology in your communication.

For any business to survive in today’s business arena, they must have effective and better ways of relating and communicating with its numerous customers; new and old, regarding prices, new products or even change of location of the business. All successful SME’s have embraced digital marketing and communication platforms as their core strategies of staying in touch with their customers. Today, a business that has a website, no matter how small it may be, has huge advantage of not only attracting more customers for example, but staying in touch regularly than the competitor with no presence on the web. New media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Twitter, among others are very effective marketing and communicating tools with customers. They are also affordable and enhances effective feedback for strategic decision making in any business today.

Where budgets will allow and for certain types of businesses, such as established ones, a blend of the new and traditional media (newspapers and TV) defines how many customers your business will attract and retain.

Read this article: Four things you need to know about money and business

Create easy payment and delivery systems.

Technology has made life so easy for modern businesses and their customers. How well are you participating in this arena? In this day and age, all serious businesses have both offline and online payment systems for their services or products. Electronic payments mediums such as Visa Card, MasterCard, American Express, and other payment platforms like Payway, Mobile Money, bank transfers among others should be integral in any modern business transaction. That, coupled with being able to deliver your products or services to a customer’s location in real time, will create new customers and retain old ones thereby increasing your size of the market share for your business.

Corporate Social Responsibility.

Your business should project itself as a pro-community enterprise. This means that once in a while, it should reach out to disadvantaged people in the community, especially where the business is located or have a reach and participate in community initiatives. Encouraging people to take care of their sanitation, protecting and conserving the environment among others, endears the community to feel that you are part of them and not only minding about profits. Cooperate social responsibility has become an integral part of corporate market penetration strategy in many markets. Customers are likely to support and patronise products and services of businesses they perceive to be supportive of the community interests. Similarly, they punish and vote against businesses whose sole and primary objective is profit, profit and profit. If you must attract and retain customers to guarantee the long-term value of your business, you must integrate corporate social responsibility into your overall business strategy, especially in the areas of your business locations.

Create a great service culture and train your staff to own.

If great customer service becomes part of your entire business culture, your business’ value goes high. Customers feel exceptionally treated when they interact with your business. To be that kind of business, takes commitment and hard work. Training and teaching your staff how to treat customers exceptionally well should be part of your culture and an ongoing training for all employees of your business. Encourage your staff to own the process of taking responsibility of every customer complaint that comes to them and resolve it. It should be the way of doing business in your business, and reinforced at any giving opportunity. Customers will honour you for that and choose to stay with you for as long as their relationship with your business is honoured and respected.

Remember customers reserve the right not to go with you, if you are taking them somewhere, they don’t want to go. Sooner than later, they will abandon you for someone else.

Employ these five strategies and make excellent service culture an integral part of your business philosophy and watch the value of your business soar beyond your imagination.

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