What’s the Connection Between Money and Friendship?

You often hear “the best customer is the repeat customer.” Seems obvious. But I keep finding business folks don’t operate like they actually believe this. Knowing repeat business is best only helps if you practice it.

Short review of why repeat business is best –

1. Acquisition effort = zero. It takes serious time and energy to go get new customers. If all you had was repeat business, you’d be free to make more money.

2. Acquisition cost = zero. You already paid to get a customer once. Now they’re yours. The cost diminishes as it’s spread across multiple transactions.

3. Word of mouth benchmark. If customers are coming back, they are more likely to be recommending you to their friends, which is the best and cheapest promotion available.

4. Friendship. It just feels better and it’s more fun to work with people you know and like. You get to know your regulars, and doggone it, there’s more to this than money.

So why do I keep having such bad customer experiences? Like, for example, the following.

I sit down in a coffee shop that prominently advertises free internet access. Before my laptop is even booted, a woman comes over and introduces herself as the owner. Then she delivers a stern lecture about how I have to buy something if I take up table space in her joint. I look around. The other tables are mostly empty.

Hey, if you have to buy something, the web access isn’t really free, now is it?

As I tune out her diatribe against freeloaders, I recall on a previous visit I overheard a conversation between two of her servers. About how this owner gave one of them down-the-country for tossing an empty bag that still had three coffee beans rattling around inside.

I get coffee and web access across the street now when I’m in that neighborhood. You might think “One customer doesn’t matter, so what?” But it’s not one. She’s probably turning others off the same way. And each one represents a stream of referrals they won’t make, and friends they’ll take across the street to her competitor’s shop. Which is thriving, by the way. No embarrassing lectures over there. No false ads.

Another scene. I take my boat to a different boatyard this year for her annual haul out. As they lift her out of the water, I notice one of the crane’s lifting straps is crossing a transducer that protrudes through the hull. This could easily cause serious and expensive damage. I had just described this item and it’s location to the crane operator along with a request that he be cautious about it.

I make them stop and reposition the lifting strap. The crane operator gives me an ugly look.

The following week, it’s time to put her back in the water. Same crane boy positions the same strap so that it’s liable to slip and hurt the same transducer.

I ask him if he thinks it’s a problem. He unloads on me with a stream of sarcastic verbal abuse. I consider whether I should complain to his management. But then it just seems easier for me to use a competing yard next time I haul out. Why should I engage the dark side when I have choices?

Practicing professionally is in part about making customer focus penetrate deeply into your operations to become an integral part of your brand image. Part of your design for your customer’s experience.

What’s that? You don’t have such a branding design?

Are you serious?

When you care enough to design their experience, your customers get it that you care about them enough to make your offering good for them. They like it when you care, and they care right back. That’s part of human nature. A part that will ring up sales if you’re shrewd enough to take advantage of it.

And keep you among friends as you do your business.

The coffee shop owner who’s now getting my business on the North side of the street would never dream of lecturing me. She does, on occasion, come by my table and, with a big sweet smile, offer to get me a cuppa joe. And she’s coached her servers to be extra careful about keeping business talk low key. To never say anything negative in front of customers.

Next year I’ll go back to my previous boat yard, probably. Even though it’s 2/3 of a day’s voyage to get there. I remember clearly of how the owner cheerfully and efficiently listens to my every need. How he happily corrected a couple things that went wrong when last his guys worked on my boat. What was I thinking this year, anyway?

Close and easy, and maybe even cheap, just don’t compete with knowing your provider cares.

If you need to, get some hormones, learn to meditate, dump your lover, recover from abuse, or whatever it takes.

Be a friend to customers.

Design it in, and they will come. And keep coming.