Jean L. Serio

You have the perfect product or service. With great benefits and all the bells and whistles. The question: Why are you losing customers?

Regardless of your product or service and it's benefits, there are many basic and unglamorous reasons you'll regularly lose customers. While a few are out of your control, many can easily be eliminated when you make your customer your #1 focus. Yet most business owners give little or no attention to loss of customers. A problem that follows them daily. And can seriously affect your business's bottom line.

1. Poor Customer Service

Regardless how fabulous, quirky or necessary your products or services are, bottom line - customers are what keep you in business. And poor customer service heads the list of reasons why customers will not continue shopping at a particular business.

Bottom line, without your customers you have no business. While in some cases a product or service will "take off" and be highly successful, you must then strive to keep that customer base buying and buying, with good to excellent customer service.

Believe it or not, a customer will forgive almost anything -- product problems, late deliveries, small promises not kept or properly kept, even your bad moods. In short, they'll excuse almost anything - except poor customer service.

Customers will take extra time out of their busy day and drive miles, through bad traffic and lousy weather - although there's a business next door to them selling the same product as yours - if you'll faithfully give them the good customer service they expect. And deserve.

Everything you do, as a business, must be customer-focused. Whether it's a return policy, the way you and your employees handle customer problems, customer ordering and dozens of other scenarios. Your policies must be written, organized and presented in a simple, easy to understand, yet professional way. Taking your customer's needs and wants into consideration.

Good customer service shows customers not only how much you appreciate their business, but makes it easy for them to do business with you.

Know your customer as well as your products:

- What do they want and need?

- What problems do they have to be solved?

- How much money will they spend on services and products they need or want?

- What extra services do they need, which with some research, you can provide?

When you know your customers, make them your #1 concern, you're on the road to successfully keeping customers you have, attracting new ones, and increasing your business's bottom line as well.

2. Lack of focused advertising

Determine who your customer is and focus your advertising on them. While the world may "be your oyster" as the song says, it's not your target market. Your target market wants, needs and can afford to buy your products and/or services. To succeed and profit, you must first determine who your specific customer is. Then sell to them.

In time, with focus, your market may expand to include other groups. Until then, stay focused on your loyal customer base. Customers who want and need your products and services.

3. Lack of clear advertising

Ever receive a flyer or an email you've read half of before discovering what they're trying to say or sell you? Annoying isn't it? And then don't you just toss it? If you did, you're like most people with neither the time, nor the magic coder ring, to figure it out.

Make your advertising specific and concise. Provide simple product and service descriptions, prices, purchase and return policies.

Be clear about what the product or service doesn't do or include. For instance "This product (service) doesn't include the following...

Never lead customers on with half-truths, include or describe services or products you rarely have available or in stock.

If you up-sell them, make sure the upgrade is worth the customer's investment or is a product readily available for shipping.

4. Failing to shop your competition

In today's competitive marketplace, much of your competition will do whatever it takes to wrangle, cajole, even outrightly lie, to lure customers away from you. And if you're just starting up, it's hard to imagine.

So make time to regularly shop your competition. Know what they sell; is it similar to what you sell; what's the average price of similar items; what are their hours and days open; customer service polices? If nothing else, you'll know what they're doing and selling. And whether you need to delete some products or services which aren't competitive enough to make a profit and replace them with others which will.

One last word:

To stay in business, to stay profitable, while it's important to have a great product or service to sell, it's VERY IMPORTANT to know your target market and what they want. Once you know this, it's your responsibility to provide them with good customer service.

It's 4:00 PM. Do you know where your customers are shopping?

Jean L. Serio, Copyright 2006. Are you one of the 1.2 million women tired of the 9-5 grind, sick of worrying about making ends meet? As you know, starting up your own business still remains one of the best strategies for providing you financial freedom. Discover how to start up a business today, with your own step-by-step Action Plan. Plus to ensure you receive all the details FREE, and learn how you can harness the power and resources you need to start, first sign up for your Free Newsletter "Start Up a Business Today" and receive your Bonus Report, "5 Mistakes Women Make Starting a Biz". "We help you make it happen!"

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