Customer relationship – How to attract customers looking for quality

Customer relationship and marketing strategies are important for any business to thrive. With the advent of the Internet, aside from direct marketing, there are email marketing and web marketing used by small/home based businesses. Internet marketers also talk a lot about search engine marketing. Keeping Customer relationship good and attracting new ones is the only way any business can survive, and grow.

How about attracting and targeting customers who are not mainly after price but looking for quality and products of value? These are clients who want a product or service that will provide their needs at the best possible price.

Foremost, customer relationship should be shown by the business owner that their needs or problems are understood. And the responsibility of the business to a customer is a part of a continuing process. The customer needs to be provided with the exact solution to their needs even before a product quotation is given.

If convinced with the quality of the product, most customers will buy a product within reasonable price range. Even up to 15% (more or less) price increase will keep the customers buying and coming back if they know the value is worth it.

Here are upfront customer relationship tips in the form of questions that a business owner can ask to find out what the customer wants to be served best.

How Did You Find out About Us?

This question provides feedback to the business in which a particular medium of advertising or marketing campaign has been effective. Customer relationship responses can also be used in tailoring new marketing campaigns.

What Product Do You Currently Use?

This will give an idea about the type of product the prospective customer wants and how much they paid for it. It will also let the business find out what kind of product should be offered. A possible related question is if the buyer wants the product in pieces or a package deal. When the business person handles the buyer in a sincere and professional fashion, more answers can be solicited from the potential customer.

Where Did You Get the Product?

This provides insight into the competition. By knowing the workings of the competitors, some tips can be learned like improving how things can be done so that the potential buyer will be attracted as a new customer instead of moving away or sticking with the competitor.

Who Will Be Using the Product?

This question provides information if anyone else will be involved in the buying decision so a pitch can be done to people involved in the process. It is important to ensure that an effective business person appeals to the customer’s needs rather than a desire just to make a sale. Many times selling doesn’t work if the focus is mainly on the price.

The last insight on how to attract customers looking for quality products is this: A business person should never quote a price without knowing exactly what the buyer or prospective customer wants. An effort should be made to explore all possible marketing solutions before stating a price.

Five Tips of Customer Relationship with Improved Quality Performance

The key customer relationship in the future will be between a company and its employees and customers. Using traditional accounting information to influence and control those relationships can often trigger behavior that actually gets in the way of improving them.

Organizations today have lived through a revolution in information technology that now requires top managers to bring about the transformation in management practices called for decades ago by W.E. Deming. That transformation requires new measurement tools. Accounting information does not contribute to more responsiveness by building better relationships with customers and employees. It also does little to encourage more flexibility in the way the organization deals with them.

Information for Management Control

Today the best management control information comes from customers and processes. It is available immediately to those in the company who are doers. To delay its impact by having it complied and transmitted through accounting channels means the key advantage of being reactive is postponed and the organization is no longer quick to respond.

With proper training and development, employees in an organization can learn how to translate this fast-flowing information into competitive action, a process much more effective than the inefficiency of waiting for managerial action. The competitive position established with this approach is nullified if decisions have to be run up and down the chain of command.

Measuring Performance

No general ledger accounting system today is capable of reflecting the value of people and time. Accordingly, organizations will continue to fall short of what they have to do to compete if they use the information from these accounting systems alone to shape the actions of people. Quality improvement mandates a move away from short term cost reduction scenarios and into long-term development of what it takes to be technically and systematically competitive.

Success comes from superior process performance so it behooves organizations to identify all of their processes so they can be measured and improved. The focus is now going farther back upstream into the processes. In this scenario, if the organization sees the presence of heroes or heroines fixing things it knows it is in trouble for reliance on these superstars betrays a lack of understanding and appreciation of systems and processes.

Improving Quality

Quality improvement is all coming back to people and teams again because superior process design creates superior performance. That takes the right people as well as the right environment for them to work in.

Improved quality performance requires a centering on customers who don’t care about what the management structure is, or the strategic plan, or the financial structure, or even the corporate culture. They care only for the results delivered and the value created for them. Since it is the processes that produce these results, they will have to perform in a structure that centers on them and a culture that supports them.

Five Tips of Creating a Culture for Improved Quality Performance

Don’t push for improved performance. Instead, remove the factors and barriers limiting it.
Beware the symptomatic solution. Solutions addressing only symptoms of improved performance limitations, not fundamental causes tend to have short-term benefits at best. In the long term, the problem resurfaces and there is even more pressure for a symptomatic response. Meanwhile, the capability for fundamental solutions can atrophy.
In a sluggish system, aggressiveness produces instability. Either be patient or make the system itself more responsive.
“Teach people to fish rather than giving them fish.” Focus on enhancing the capability of the company and each department to solve its own problems. If outside help is needed, helpers or consultants should be strictly limited to a one-time intervention (and everyone knows this in advance) or be able to help people develop their own resources, skills, and infrastructure to be more capable in the future.
Hold the vision. This will be particularly challenging in times of organizational stress so strong committed leadership is essential here.