Your Customers Are Made of Money
I HAVE to break this to you, businesses cannot survive without customers. A business without customers is like a well without out water. Good customer service is the ground water that fills up your well. You’re high and dry without a reputation for taking care of your customers. Plus, the longer you keep customers, the wetter your well, because long term customers are more profitable. A 5% increase in customer retention can boost profit by 25% to 125%
Not digging the well analogy? Here is another way to think about it; your customers are money, gold to be exact, because they appreciate in value as time goes on. You may not think of customers as goods that can be bought or traded, but they’re assets to your company, just like stock investments or an office computer. They are them most vital part of your business’s economic machinery.
You pay hard-earned business capital to market to your customers, you essentially buy their patronage, one person at a time. Once bought, a customer will continue to generate your income, without much further advertising effort. On the flip side, customers who leave take with them every cent that you invested in marketing to them.
Customer retention is FREE MONEY! If you go the extra mile to keep customers, your marketing budget will go down, and your profits will go through the roof. You’ll have to ‘buy’ less new customers, and loyal customers generate some powerful word-of-mouth patronage.
Losing customers has the opposite effect, and can be truly devastating. And, you have no excuse for customers walking away from your business because of poor service, it’s the most controllable factor of your business. Technology can fail, accounts can pay late, but there is no reason to be rude or inattentive to a customer.
One way to gear up for fantastic customer service it to train employees to see each customer for how much they’re really worth. They may treat customers a bit differently if they imagined them as giant stacks of money or piles of gold. Each retained customer is (literally) money in the bank.
The customer is mad. You didn’t do what she wanted, maybe you weren’t friendly enough, maybe you didn’t know enough about the product. Whatever the problem, you have to fix it, the consequences for not doing so are severe. Even if she’s mad, you’re going to want to keep her as a customer. It costs five to six times as much to get a new (first time) customer as it does to keep a current one. 
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