5 ways to keep your best customers
What’s the most valuable asset of
any business?
You only guessed right if you said:
“Loyal customers!”
This realization is just beginning to dawn
on many drycleaners, because new customers are getting
increasingly difficult to come by. Throughout the years it has
been consistently demonstrated that a relatively small
percentage of a drycleaner’s customers account for a
large portion of its profits.
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What’s more, these days, even
customers who say they’re satisfied with their current
drycleaner don’t always act that way. Seventy-five
percent of customers who chose a new drycleaner said they were
at least somewhat satisfied with their old cleaner.
As a lifelong student of quality customer
service, I’ve only found five different ways to retain
good customers:
Identify your most loyal customers
If you fail to differentiate between your
most valuable customers and all the others, you will be selling
a service that satisfies no one because it tries to satisfy
everyone. This is not a “one size fits all”
business.
The tendency to treat all customers alike
is particularly tempting because it doesn’t require you
to get to know your customers as individuals. It takes time and
a real effort to learn what each individual customer expects
from you.
Loyal customers can be identified by
finding the answers to three questions:
• Which customers are the most
profitable?
• Which customers place the greatest
value on the services you offer?
• Which of your customers are worth
more to you than to your competitors?
Accounting systems typically record
transactions rather than relationships. You can’t expect
to have the answers to these questions waiting on your desk on
Monday morning. Obtaining them requires careful analysis.
However, if your counter is computerized, The Golomb Group has
found a way to provide you with this invaluable information.
Calculating the value of a customer over
the course of a year clearly shows the payoff from long-term
relationships with the right customers. Identifying and paying
attention to your most loyal customers doesn’t mean that
all the others fall by the wayside. The main benefit is that
you will learn how to attract more loyal customers.
Measure what matters
Most experts agree that the true test of
loyalty is a customer’s decision to repurchase.
Unfortunately, measuring a customer’s inclination to
repurchase from you can be very difficult.
Many cleaners are misled by a lack of
customer complaints. The truth is: if you only look at formal
complaints — the tip of the iceberg — you will miss
the larger mass of unspoken dissatisfaction. What cracks your
hull is what lies below the surface. Even measuring
“market share” tells you nothing about customer
retention. Nor does it tell you how much business you might be
doing with each customer if you were providing greater
satisfaction.
To accurately measure a customer’s
loyalty, you need to measure your “share” of that
customer. That is, the proportion of a customer’s total
potential business that you have. The higher your customer
share, the less likely that customer will defect to a
competitor.
Analyze defections
Once you know which customers you really
want to keep, you need to take a hard look at those who have
left you to go elsewhere. Your greatest marketing lesson may
not be in how to gain new customers but in how to win back old
ones.
One way to do this is to assign a person
to contact lost customers and use the
“5-why’s,” a series of questions to determine
the real reasons for their leaving you.
Example:
Q: Why did you stop using our services?
A: I got a better deal from another
cleaner.
Q: Why was his a better deal?
And so on. The answer to the last
“why?” may be very different than the answer to the
first. When first asked, customers typically cite price as the
reason they left, but often price is an easy excuse for other
complaints.
Cleaners who diligently go after lost
customers can regain up to 30 percent by contacting them and
listening attentively to their concerns.
Mass customize
Mass customization is a way in which even
high volume cleaners can increase loyalty by treating their
customers as individuals.
Customization can be — and in many
cases, has to be — built into a cleaner’s business
system. Through the use of computers at the counter, every
counterperson can have instant access to every customer’s
individual preferences.
Examples: One customer may prefer to have
each garment bagged separately; another customer may like his
laundered shirts folded for travel.
Meet unspoken needs
As I said in the beginning, customers now
want, and expect, more than ever. You can do everything right,
as far as what the customer tells you they want, and still lose
the customer. Learning about unspoken needs of the customer can
only happen over time, and between individuals. This is the
greatest argument for keeping consistent counter-personnel.
Long-term relationships are built between human beings, not
databases. No amount of technology can contribute as much to
the satisfaction and happiness of your customers.
Dennis McCrory works with The Golomb Group
which provides direct mail and marketing services for
drycleaners. They also produce the following book and video
packages:
• “The Caplan Method of Stain
Removal”
• “The Caplan Method of Shirt
Laundering and Finishing,”
• Also available is McCrory’s
“Pre-employment Screening Kit.”
To order any of these, call The Golomb
Group, (800) 679-5856.
