Title: 
Serving Your Existing Customer

Word Count:
537

Summary:
So much is being said and written about winning new customers, that a very important aspect of customer service and business growth goes by the wayside: serving your existing customer! In some cases this may just be the small account that has been with you sine the inception of your business when you were still scraping together all you had just to rent a store front. In other cases this may be a large account that is highly labor intensive and where you might be tempted to c...


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Article Body:
So much is being said and written about winning new customers, that a very important aspect of customer service and business growth goes by the wayside: serving your existing customer! In some cases this may just be the small account that has been with you sine the inception of your business when you were still scraping together all you had just to rent a store front. In other cases this may be a large account that is highly labor intensive and where you might be tempted to cut corners just to get on with other tasks at hand.

Business professionals will counsel you to treat the larger account better than the smaller one, but by and large not to spend too much time on either; instead you should focus your strength, time and effort on finding new business. Interestingly, this philosophy, although it may make sense on paper at first glance, could quite possibly be the death knell for your up and coming business!

For example, did you know that all the account which you may be able to bring into the fold will grow your overall business, yet they will do so less consistently than the one big account that will consistently place big orders or the one small account that will continue to frequent your business? While there is nothing wrong with seeking to attract new business, perhaps your methodology of going about it could be tweaked to such an extent that the attraction of new business to your company is a natural outcropping of the services you provide, and thus you will both retain current business even as you gain new accounts.

A premier approach that is quite often favored by the savvy entrepreneur is the addition of new services that can be tacked on to the actual business services you currently provide. Even if they are only tangential, they will add a certain value to the accounts you offer and thus set you apart from the competition. Of course, this presupposes that you know your large account and understand the departmental and personnel needs and preferences involved. The same is true for your small account. By getting to know those involved in the account with which you are doing and whose money you are relying to keep open your doors, you will enable yourself to anticipate their needs and perhaps even become instrumental in your customers’ ability to reach the next level of their business.

This approach will make you a valuable asset to those who take their business to you and thus you will almost diminish the odds of their picking up their business and moving it elsewhere. In addition to the foregoing, by becoming intrinsically important to the customers, the notion of picking up their stakes and moving accounts to a competitor becomes a seemingly insurmountable task they will not wish to contemplate or perform.

Of course, making your business more valuable to your already existing customers is not something you contemplate on the fly. Instead, it will require meticulous planning and also marketing that will ensure that not only is your business relationship strengthened, but any money spent on the new innovations is applied without waste and for maximum profit.