Business Growth – Tips for growing your customer base

Business Growth:

Tips for keeping and growing your customer base

1. Hire the best.

   Have and hire only employees who continually impress you with their initiative and competence.  Let everyone else go.  Increasing profits comes from great employees, not average ones.

2. Establish your R&D Department.

   Turn your customer service department into the R&D Department of your company.  Develop a culture in your business which will encourage lateral thinking.

3. Review Customer issues.

   Is there a lack of effective communication channels with your customers or is there a high volume of customer complaints, a lot of product returns, and low customer retention.

4. Ask your customers.

   Keep in touch with your customers, clients, employees and staff, and ask them what else they need/want from you.   Even better, ask past customer, people that for some reason stopped buying from you. You’ll be amazed at what you’ll find out along with the opportunities it will present…

5. Focus completely on satisfying your customers.

   Develop a true customer focus. Understand that customers always go where they get good value, they go where they are treated well, and when the value isn’t obvious or when the level of service slips, the customer slips away.

6. Identify your target customer;

   the more you know about your customers, the easier it is to serve them well.

7. Increase the customer’s perception of value.

   Value is not the same as price. It also includes concerns of quality (are your products/services better?) and quantity (do you offer more than others?). But most customers are somewhat price sensitive. Instead of across-the-board mark-up, small businesses should consider variable pricing strategies.