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What Is The Importance Of Small Business
Delivery and effectiveness of customer service
Proposal on a customer loyalty program
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The old saying, “it’s not personal, it’s business” comes to mind when thinking about how to effectively run your business in this, and any, economy. What we should be thinking, and how we should be approaching our customers is, “it’s personal, it’s business”. People want to feel that extra touch of personalized service, and indeed, expect to be “wooed” in order to remain a customer. Regular customers want to be remembered when they walk into your store, they want to feel they belong. Consequently, calling them by name and making them feel welcome will set their shopping experience apart from all other stores they frequent. Essentially what we are trying to achieve is to get back to the way things were done before the obsession with big box stores, profits above customers, and measuring our successes by the bottom line only.
In the early 1900’s customers were waited on by formally dressed staff members and shown individual products. They were guided through their shopping experience, and staff was trained to pick up on the small nuances of focusing on the customer’s needs.
After WW I that changed, people started waiting on themselves and taking their items to a teller for checkout. Staffing costs prevented retailers from employing enough staff to cover their store’s needs, plus cutting back staffing costs meant more money in the store owner’s pockets. This step towards customer autonomy, and less employed staff, removed the personalized service from the retail environment and it’s time to get it back!
We know why we are in business, it is to make a living, but in order to make a living it is important to remember the people that keep us in business, and those people are our customers. How can this return to customer focused servic...
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...ing new in our store, sending out appreciation letters to frequent visitors, or providing extra discounts on birthday’s.
These are but a few suggestions to begin the process of thinking about the details that make the shopping experience special.
WRAPPING UP
This adjustment is about getting back to a time when people treated their customers like the treasured gifts they are. Customers are your lifeline; they provide you not only with financial gain but are the very purpose you are in business, to provide a specialized service, so make it specialized by using these customer focused skills.
Works Cited
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Hyken, Shep. hyken.com. n.d. Web. 28 May 2014.
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Wordpress.org. n.d. Web. 29 May 2014.
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Carl Sewell’s book “Customers for Life” is devoted to teaching the businessperson of today ways in which they can turn one-time buyers into customers for life. He states that every customer has the ability to be worth 332,000 dollars to your business if you can keep them for life. Mr. Sewell is the number selling luxury automobile dealer in the country. He started from the bottom and manipulated his automobile business into a 250,000,000-dollar business. In his book he explains the things that he has found to work for his business in great detail so that you may also apply them to your business. The entire book revolves around these 10 commandments to customer service:
Over the years, the American department store has developed and evolved as not only a commercial business but also a cultural institution. While it has weathered many storms and changes since its inception and throughout history, its most predominant enemy has been a change in the lifestyle of the American people (Whitaker, 2013). As the customer’s needs and wants have shifted, department stores have struggled to keep up with demands. It has been argued that the decline of the department store has been ongoing for the last 50 years (Whitaker, 2013). This dissertation aims to understand how the department store has historically played a role in consumer culture and spending, and additionally, how this has evolved and changed in today’s retail market. Although department stores may not be able to take all the credit for inventing modern shopping, they certainly made its conventions and conveniences commonplace. They set a new standard for the way the consumer should expect to be treated, the type of services that should be provided, and the convenience that should attend the process of acquiring the necessities and niceties of life all in one place. They made shopping into a leisure pastime. This environment meant shopping was a means of freedom to look around, pick up objects with no obligations to buy. As one historian remarked, department stores: “encouraged a perception of the building as a public place, where consumption itself was almost incidental to the delights of a sheltered promenade in a densely crowded, middle-class urban space” (Whitaker, 2006). Although this perception and view of the department store has changed over the years, this paper aims to follow the trail of how and why that happened.
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First, when shopping, a big factor that will impact a customer 's experience is the customer service. Whether it’s from a simple “hello”, or an employee going out
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