Hi Folks

I would like to ask the question to all of you who deal in the area of keeping your customers happy and satisfied and coming back for more.

It is a business fact that it costs more to recruit a new customer than to keep and exhisting one.

The question is:

What do you think about a tool that could help to improve this process and could warn you when certain levels are starting to fall below the desired standard ?(i.e an early warning system)

My Sincere Regards


John Nutley

Hi John,

Surely all our individual CRM systems (or acronyms of the same) already perform this very task, whether they be off the shelf, bespoke or designed in house. This coupled with satisfaction surveys should be early warning enough. Unless these tools aren't being used properly, or they were bought before really scoping the design spec & function requirements.

Never-the-less if you have managed to design something which can do what you are aiming at, I think you might well be retiring in the not too distant future. I suggest a hot climate with adequate beach access.

The only problem then becomes do you all share the customers equally, or does some one get them all first. Unfortunately customers these days enjoy shopping too much. Jobs are no longer for life and neither are the customers. I blame the credit card companies. They actively encourage 'card surfing' for the best deal, which is now common practice in all areas of consumer spending.

Best
Graham

...the finance companies are in a tight corner. Money is pretty much the same wherever it comes from. Their market is therefore leading the way in other areas of marketing and customer loyalty than, say, specialist holidays. Customer service is just one aspect of a product or service's attributes - it is very important, but so is price, quality, packaging, location, ... you know the drill.

Depending on how standardised your product is (contrast Petrol with newspapers, banking services with deodorant, ...) depends on how hard you need to approach other factors, including customer service. If the product is highly standard - financial services, petrol, anything where the fundamental thing you get as a customer is pretty much the same wherever you go - makes the product "surround" that much more important - this is where customer service, price, availability, location... all come in to their own. Where the product is down to personal preference, then there are always going to be people who seek out the Sunday Sport or the Scottish Daily Record, the people who travel specifically to their local pharmacy because these are the only guys to stock Pears soap... here the service surround is not so important.

Hope this opens the debate!

Duncan