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What Big Businesses Can Teach Small Business About Customer Loyalty
If you were to ask most owners of small businesses what is the most important issue in being successful, they would answer “customer satisfaction”. But for some long-term successful big businesses, the answer is “continuous improvement of your customer’s effectiveness”. It is like refocusing from looking at the immediate relationship you have with your customer and they have with your products and services, to looking at your customer’s entire world and what it takes to make them more effective within that environment. This will give you a bigger, more relevant perspective on their life and work. Pursuing customer effectiveness in this manner leads to customer loyalty.
Customer Effectiveness is NOT the latest fad from business school professors but is a basic approach that the best of businesses, like Procter and Gamble, DuPont Corp., and Clorox have been pursuing for over three decades. As Finn Hovland, Executive Vice President of DuPont of Canada, says, “satisfying the customer’s needs is something any competitor can do; but it does not cause them to come to you first and stay with you last. You have to be like a personal consultant to your customers and determine what will help them succeed. Then make that [product] for them or supply that service. It is what we had to learn to do first before we could go on the other critical…
