A Regular Customer: Understanding the Why, What, & How

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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.

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A Brief On The Fluidity of Customer Service

Customer service is something we deal with every day, whether we want to or not. The history of customer service goes back decades, as long as there were businesses. We’re talking really long donkey years here. But essentially, here it is in brief.

Someone decided to start a business. A business relies on customers for its survival, and its essential existence. That meant providing service (go figure). Now when customer service first started, I can only imagine that there was no structure, or maybe there was. The evolution of what me now consider customer service started as early as 1793 in the United States, in the form of Loyalty programs. Sure, it has been around as long as there were traders, but let’s pick a point shall we.

Of course, this has evolved through the years, following technological advance. We live in time of amazing ease of communication. However, can you imagine when telephones first appeared on the scene? That’s right, that lead to the first customer service hotline.

Evolution of customer services aside. Have a look at the infographic for a little visual fun on that. The point is this. Customer service practices are an evolving thing. You’ve heard the terms before,:

“Business Need to Adapt.”

If you don’t evolve, you lose out.

How often have we come across often rigid, customer service structures? Business train their employees according to a structure according to possible scenarios, but here is where the ball is often dropped. They often don’t explain why certain things are done in a certain way. Expecting “people” to act like rigid “robots” to a particular situation will eventually cause a “404 error”. Customers are organic, living creatures, often looked at in terms of demographics when it comes to marketing. Yes, they do try to take this into account when it comes to customer service. But do they ever explain it in way that is assimilated into the working ethic of customer service personnel.?

With all the advances in modern tech, customer service can no longer be rigid. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (that’s seeing a resurgence thanks to current world situations), and so much more. Business need to be fluid in provide the best service possible. How personal can you get? How casual can you be? How do you turn a bad situation on its head, making it positive? Can you leverage social media?

The line between casual and stiff professionalism, is often blurred in most industries, this goes for customer services as well. The rigidity of the industrial age , no longer works at its best. This is the age of communication. So, shall we communicate?

Stay tuned for our next post on great examples of fluid Social Media Customer Service.

 

Customer Service Infographic

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5 Customer Types every Business should Understand

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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.

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Human Decency and the Customer Experience

This morning on the way into work, I was confronted with human decency.

After a rough start to the day – starting with my oversleeping – all I wanted was to buy my morning caffeine hit from the little coffee place where I get my wake-up call every morning.

I auto-piloted off the train and out of the station and headed towards caffeine. As I waited in line, coffee in hand, the gentleman in front of me glanced back and then told the cashier that he’d get my drink as well. I didn’t think I looked that tired, but maybe I did; it was one of those days.

Now. As a female, alone, and in public, there are several things that go through my head when something like this happens. My brain processes go roughly like this:

Brain: Wait what?
Voice: You don’t have to!…Are you sure?
Brain: What’s the catch?/I’m not going out with you./There has to be a catch, no one does stuff like this./Do I really look that tired?/Do I come across as being unable to afford my own coffee?/I’m offended/I’m flattered/I’m late! I don’t have time to be nicer!
Voice: Thank you!
Brain: Darn, I hope I expressed my thanks properly./Oh, he’s gone with no further queries or conversation./Now I feel guilty for doubting his motives, I hope he understands that I’m grateful./Faith in humanity restored.

Maybe it’s a sign of the times, or possibly of my inner cynic revealing herself because it’s too early in the morning and my collective consciousness has had a rough start. Truth is, I am grateful. Not just for the coffee, but for the fact that there are still people out there who believe in doing right.

Part of the problem with the world is that we’ve lost sight of each other as individual people. We’re all so caught up in our personal issues that we forget that we’re all part of the same world and we could all use a bit of human decency.

“Pay it forward,” the gentleman from this morning said to me. And I will.

Something else this experience highlighted was that one of the best customer service pointers you can have in your toolbox is simple human decency.

Empathy is one of those things we talk about a lot, but rarely practice. How much do we actually care that the customer who just came in had trouble parking? Or ran into an old friend just down the street? Be honest: we don’t actually care at all – we may listen, and nod and smile, but as soon as the customer’s out the door we’ll forget about their little experience. That’s just how humanity works.

I’m not suggesting that we take everyone’s stories home with us – that’s not healthy, but really listening to someone’s story gives you a deeper connection with that customer, and customer service is all about connections. Human decency is about how well we develop those connections and under what motives we form them.

The gentleman from this morning had nothing material to gain from buying my coffee for me – he wasn’t even the one doing the selling – but what he did prove was that a simple gesture of human decency completely changed my day. Apply that to customer service and you get a winning recipe. Showing people a personal touch, paying a little more attention to their needs, can make all the difference.

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