Fr. T.O. Sebastian
[dropcap]S[/dropcap]ales promotion is an important factor in the progress of your business. You need to take care of your customers if you want to promote your sales. The customers are all not of the same category. You need to define who are your right customers. Every customer is not your best customer. You have to observe which customer’s needs wants do tally with your vision and capabilities of your company. Some customers make such demands of you that you are ill-equipped to serve them or it will be too expensive for your company to cater to them. There are others who are difficult to satisfy since these requests are rather unreasonable and burdensome. You have to define your customer and find who are contributing most to your sales. It means contributing most to your profit.A particular shop has put up a tag which reads: “An educated customer is our best customer”. This sentence gives a customer entering the shop a sense of elation. He feels he is looked upon as an educated customer which is a great honour. Another way of looking at the same sentence is to remind self to educate if he is not educated. In the actual business of sales, you have small I customers and big customers. But who is the small customer and the big customer. But who is the right customer in business? The right customer is the one who gives you a lot of sales and thereby good profit. In determining the right customer you will find that not all big customers need not be the right customer. Some big customers may make so many demands of you that your transaction costs run high and you are finally left with a poor margin.
On the contrary a small customer can be the right customer, if his transaction cost is low and sales are steady and long term engagement. In most business it is found that nearly 80% of business is obtained from 20% customers. Conversely 20% of business is obtained from 80% customers. For the growth of business, customer care is an essential component. Once you have defined your right customer, the next thing to do is to create a strategy to serve your right customer. You must have an operational process. It means to have a collection of best practices in customer care and apply them to your right the customer. Every company develops its own set of practices to serve the right customer. In some shops there are people who accompany you personally from the time you step in till you step out, attending to your every requirement. In others, instead, if a stuff that you want to have but not available there, someone goes out of that shop and brings it to you. Some others go a step further and note down your address and phone number and promise to reach the material at your door. Still others pack your purchase in attractive bags and carry it for you to the car. These are your operational strategies to take care of your right customer. There is no general rule here. Each establishment selects its own strategies to suite its purpose. Each group builds up its own tradition of customer care and improves and perfects its strategies with the experience gathered in its history.
