by Farhad Khurshed

Created on: July 03, 2008   Last Updated: June 13, 2009

Customers! Love them or hate them! But as the life blood to fuelling an organisation's profits, we all need them. They are a curious breed though. They always want to squeeze the very most for the very least they'll have to pay.
Whether it's in the form of price discounts, additional service or demands on your time. It's no surprise then that often customers are perceived as ruthless, selfish, demanding and disloyal.

Here's a typical situation. You've done business with someone for several years and they've been good customers. You've given them exceptional service and you consider they are your customers for life. But then some little thing possibly out of your control goes wrong, or they see an ad or get a call from a competitor, someone they've never met before, with a slightly lower price, and the next thing you know, they' re gone! Without uttering a word to you. Either they don't care or feel too embarrassed to tell you.

If you have a large customer base, you may not notice it at first. But soon you realize that you haven't heard from your customer for a long time. When you finally get around to making that call to find out what happened, you feel terribly hurt. Had they just called you, you might have been able to negotiate a new arrangement with just a few tweaks to your existing one and carry on doing business. But it's too late, they're gone.

Such a situation is repeated so very often with businesses owners and some large organisations too, whatever product or service they may be selling. It is going to happen. To pretend that it doesn't, or won't happen, is simply deceiving yourself.

So what should you do in such a situation? Just write off the loss of a good customer? Blame the customer's sense of integrity, and carry on as usual? That's not the thing you should do. Instead, now is the time to become even more proactive and go after that "lost" customer.

One of the best ways to reduce the frequency of losing your good customers is to remind them of the reasons they bought from you in the first place. Regularly scheduled meetings or conversations with your customers to remind them of their motives can go a long way in helping insulate your business from the competition.

Always remember, that your competition has similar products, services and prices. Studies have found that your customer's reasons for buying are only 35 percent based on those products, services, and prices. The other 65 percent is for what you can do for them. Are you always available to solve their problems? If you can't do it yourself, can you recommend someone else to help them and follow up to see that that the problem has been solved?

You need to spend the time with customers. Review their needs, wants and concerns. These change with their business cycle. Reinforce their motives, and their decisions for buying, and you will reduce defection of customers to the competition and develop not only loyal customers, but friends, as well.

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