Having established that a “Regular Customer” is a business’ bread and butter – a reliable source of income – the question becomes: how does a business create a regular customer? Why does the regular customer keep coming back? What makes them The Regular?
In previous articles, we’ve brushed on many reasons why customers return to stores. Essentially, those articles have been the prelude to answering the question: how do stores generate loyal customers? I’m not talking about customers who visit on occasion; this is about the Regular Customer. A ‘regular customer’ is a person who habitually returns to a store over a prolonged period of time.
What is a ‘regular customer’?
It is easier to spot a regular customer in a hospitality situation than in a retail store. Food and drinks are something that are more readily consumed than clothes, shoes, or makeup: a regular customer may come back every Wednesday, for example, purely based on the fact that that’s the day they have to wait for their daughter to finish ballet practice. A regular customer may swing by every morning on their way to work to pick up a standing order – large latte with two sugars and a cinnamon scroll. A regular customer is the sort of customer you can rely on to be in your store on a regular basis, almost like clockwork.
That is not to say that regular customers show up only at ‘scheduled’ times. Regular customers have built your business into their lives; it’s a habit for them to visit your shop. However, they may also show up unexpectedly, out of cycle, so to speak. Why? Because your shop is the first one that comes to mind when they require your type of products or services: if you’ve gone to the same hair salon for a year on a regular basis and you suddenly need a quick style for a special event, it’s unlikely that you’ll go to a different hair salon.
What it comes down to is that humans are creatures of habit. They rarely stray out of their routines or zones of comfort, and that is something businesses can build on to create regular customers.
How do I create regular customers?
As always, the first step to creating any type of customer loyalty is to understand them. Every business deals with differing demographics. It’s important to ask yourself the correct questions so you can empathize appropriately with your customer-base:
What do my customers want when they come into my store?
Are my customers young/old/middle-aged? How should this affect my service style and/or decor?
Am I stocking the products that the demographic is after?
These are some of the things businesses should be asking to come to know who their customers are.
Once a firm grasp on the demographic, its desires, and its needs has been established you can start to zone in on what it is that your regular customer might want. It’s often easier to look at your regulars – every business has at least one – and see why it is that they keep coming back. Is it the convenient location of your storefront? Or do they like the music you play? The friendly service?
Not all regular customers will have the same reasons, and you might find that they don’t even know themselves why they keep coming back. Most people can be considered ‘part of the herd’, meaning they’ll follow the crowd. If friends, coworkers, or acquaintances have recommended your business, that might be enough of a reason for them to keep coming back – even if their experiences haven’t always been 100% positive.
For example, there used to be a bakery near where I lived in Melbourne, several years ago. It was always packed to the rafters with families, individuals, all manner of people of all walks of life – the consensus was that the coffee was terrible and the pastry was passable, and yet it was always full. Why? It had a convenient location, right on the main street; more importantly than that, however, was its history: it had been the only bakery in miles for decades, and as a result, people had simply grown accustomed to coming there, regardless of the quality of the food.
Eventually, the bakery went broke when a new bakery moved in across the street – the quality was great, the service was even better. It took a little more than a year, and the new place struggled, but eventually, through word of mouth and some great marketing the new place stole the majority of the regular customers away from the old bakery – primarily the younger demographic which hadn’t grown up with the old bakery and weren’t as attached to it.
Winning Them Over
In other words, it’s not always easy to nail down what it is that brings a regular customer back. It could just be a historical habit, built on generations of going to the same place; or it could be location and convenience, you could just sell the best product in the street, or you offer the best customer service in the area.
This last element, providing the customer service experience that people want, is by far the best way to generate customer loyalty, advocacy, and beat your competition. Anyone can sell what you’re selling, no matter how unique you think your product is, but no one can copy your customer service experience.
After many intense hours of fieldwork, quality analysis, intrinsic research, and valuable insights market research companies proudly deliver the Mystery Shopping Report to your company doorstep. This valuable data is there to help you develop strategies to increase your service and sales performances. It eventually finds its way downstream to one of the many shops that has been visited by one of the many mystery shoppers! And of course, both the sales team and the Shop manager are awaiting this moment with excitement!
So why are we so curious to see this Report?
One of the reasons for this is because many have been working hard, because of less successful previous Reports or because they want to match or even surpass them! Whatever reason the company employees have for being so exciting about all of this, it all comes to the conclusion that Retail is detail!
It will always be a challenge, how to become more detailed and what details need the main focus. And every detail counts obviously! Detail about what shoppers experienced or not experienced in your specific shops or details about what the shopper thought about that big Christmas tree in the middle of the main entrance? All questions that can be answered by that extensive report lying on the coffee table in the canteen.
What to do?
To get to all of this, the shop manager needs to decide what the next step will be and how to address the employees with the new findings of the report. After a short briefing of the shop manager with the exciting news that “it” has arrived, everyone strives for a glimpse of the report. You, the shop manager…Are you going to take the Mystery Shopping Report as a starting point for a training session, are you going to evaluate it step by step, or is it just a reminder of what to do right the next time?
No matter what way you choose as a shop manager, always be reminded of the fact that mystery shopping is a measurement tool for your service delivery and the report is a summary of how your company is doing on delivering service to your customers. And most important question what is your company aiming at? You need a basis that will lead you towards your main service objectives.
Here are five components needed for a better understanding of your Mystery Shopping Report:
- Intrinsic motivation
- Participation
- Commitment
- Awareness
- Rewarding
To succeed, you need full participation and interaction of your employees and thus do not make your employees see this whole process as spying or as a performance evaluation! With this mixture your sales department will use the Mystery Shopper report in the most efficient way and you will be able to realize change!
Also read this article: Retail Customer Service: Reality of Retail Industry
On this journey we will take you further into many other steps that will lead us to the best practices for the best service delivery!
Customers are the lifeblood of every business. Businesses exist purely based on the sales and services they provide their customers. Understanding customers, why they do what they do – and buy what they buy! – starts with understanding a few basic customer types. While putting people into strict categories is difficult, and often inadvisable, getting to know a couple of stereotypes will help establish strategies to deal with them as well.
5 General Customer Types:
The Regular
Every store has at least one regular – whether it’s a cafe, supermarket, or retail shop. Regular customers are the ones who return to the store on a consistent basis. In the hospitality industry – cafes, restaurants, etc. – these customers tend to have a standard order, a favourite place to sit, and make it a habit to swing by at the same time each week. They’re predictable, and value predictability – they’re also a business’ bread and butter clientele. They’re most likely to recommend your business to others, and bring their friends and acquaintances to your establishment.
The Hands-off Customer
These customer types are often considered the easiest to service. They come to a store because they’re looking for something specific; they know what they want, what it should cost, and have come to a particular place looking for it. In sales speak, these customers are 90% through the buyer’s journey and don’t necessarily require any hands-on customer service. Asking if they require any assistance or if they’re interested in specials is usually met with a polite “No, thank you.”
The Unpleasable Customer
Everyone who has worked in any customer-facing position knows these customers. These are the eternal complainers, the ones who are simply impossible to please. Even if your business has exactly what they want they will find something that does not meet their standards or expectations. They require extra – often exclusive – attention, and often ask for the supervisor or manager. Truth be told, the only way to manage these customers is to do the best you can, and be forever courteous. Careful handling of this type of customer may not lead to sterling recommendations or any customer advocacy, but it can stop them from complaining to their friends and family – one wrong step with this stereotype and your business could suffer a negative hit of publicity!
The Window Shopper
“Were you after anything particular today?”
“No, thank you. I’m just browsing.”
This little conversation is a common occurrence in most retail outlets, and even in the occasional cafe or restaurant. The Window Shopper comes in two general categories:
- The Researcher: looking for something but isn’t entirely sure what it is yet – or if your business is the right place to get it.
- The Browser: literally just looking without any intention to buy anything.
Neither type is a waste of time in any regard and should be considered as a potential customer – maybe not today or tomorrow, but eventually.
The Unicorn
The unicorn of all customers: the one who comes in regularly, gushes positivity about your establishment, and just won’t shut up about how amazing your business is when they’re talking with their friends. This perfect, ideal customer fits your dream client exactly; they’re the sort of person you hope will walk in through the door, they’re the one you strive to reach. For example, if you sell minivans, your unicorn might be a soccer mom with a big budget and six kids – oh, and the reason why she’s buying a van is because she’s carpooling with the other mothers at school, to whom she will avidly recommend your van. In marketing terms, she is the ideal customer persona. Unicorns are mythical – they don’t really exist; no matter what industry you are in – but it’s important to understand that they are a dream, a target, however impossible to strive for. The purpose of knowing what your unicorn looks like is to strive to turn every single one of your customers into your ideal customer through great customer service.
By understanding customers, businesses can learn to grow in the right direction to meet their customer expectations, train their customer service representatives, and develop better communication tactics to deal with particular elements of their customer base. While this list generalizes customer types, it’s important to realize that there are certain elements of each stereotype at play in each individual customer.
As today’s world is pretty chaotic it’s no surprise that businesses also live on the edge of chaos. Everything that is valid for a business today does probably not count tomorrow.
In order to survive, the challenges business face need to be navigated. To do this properly, it helps to consider four realities. Vusi Thembekwayo, businessman and thought leader, calls them “the laws of leadership”.
Truth
The first law is to find the truth. In larger corporations, every department has a different answer to the same question, seeing the company through their “business perspective filter” resulting in many “truths”. For example, customer complaints often don’t reach C-level. Even though frontline staff deals daily with customers and is best positioned to know their concerns about a company, product, or service, upper management tends not to listen. The closer a company comes to find the “real truth”, the better it can face the challenges.
Best
The second law follows the motto “bigger is not always better”, companies should aim to be the best in what they do, not the biggest to succeed in business. Even though scale definitely is a competitive advantage and brings many benefits, such as a wider spread of costs, scale alone does not make up for economic leadership. To outperform competitors thinking must go beyond scale. Innovating must never stop, companies must redesign their resilience day by day. To this end, digitalization is certainly a force that helps shake up the power of scaling as it turned the business world upside down, providing opportunities for disruption and innovation.
Vision
The third law is to keep in mind that “vision excites people. Not numbers. If you want to inspire people, give them a vision of what you seek to achieve.” It is not the financial ROI and meeting KPI’s that is exciting and motivates employees. It also isn’t what makes a customer buy a product or service. It is inspirational leadership that makes people wake up and go to work day by day performing giving their best.
Communicating the purpose, belief, and vision are what gives the company a “heart”. As Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle model suggests:, it is communicating the “why” first that makes people buy.
Mission
The last, most powerful and probably most difficult law is to lead by the business case. This means that neither the qualification nor the level and years of service a person worked at a firm matter. Instead, all people should be given a voice, aimed at the message that wants to be conveyed. This is easier said than done, especially since people usually categorize information based on who the messenger is or the job position they hold.
Conclusion
What makes all this important for businesses is that, in principle, these so-called ‘laws’ of leadership are simple, but not necessarily easy to apply. Escaping the chaos by narrowing down the complexity of business navigation to four laws is using the power of simplicity. Oversimplifying a complex issue eases the decision-making process to bring/ keep a business on the path to success.
