Archive for January 10th, 2012
Building loyalty through customer commitment
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012As a small business owner, today’s competitive market may be intimidating. If a competitor cuts prices or offers other incentives, you may feel tempted to do the same thing in order to hold on to your customers, even if it puts the stability of your business at risk.
Though cost is important to customers today, it is but one component of a larger, more important attribute — value. If your business provides it through service, responsiveness, and going the “extra mile,” your customers will respond with loyalty, regardless of what your competition does.
Building loyalty through value is something small business owners have been good at for centuries because they are better able to cultivate relationships with their customers. They focus not just on selling to them, but also keeping them. That stability is more efficient and predictable for everyone involved.
Building loyalty is not a marketing matter, so don’t look there for help. To foster customer loyalty, a small business needs a strategy that keeps patrons coming back. It starts with basics that are sometimes overlooked. Thanking customers for their business, for example, goes a long way. But try going beyond a few spoken words. Write some thank you notes and letters. Make them personal and sincere. Just let them know you appreciate their business.
Creating value will help boost loyalty. Ask customers if there is anything else you could be doing for them. Then, after they tell you, do it. When a customer leaves, you should consider it unacceptable. Find out why it happened and then work to prevent it from happening again.
Remember, too, that your customers’ needs are always changing, and that they may find attributes or “extras” in other business that put your service elements at a disadvantage. Take ease of access, for example. Make sure all your touch points — your phones, Web site, store layout, etc. — operates with your customer’s needs in mind. Visiting competitors’ locations and sites may alert you to areas where you may be behind, and spark ideas for making a good service or process even better. If your customers like what they find at your business, they’ll keep coming back for more.
To learn more about generating customer loyalty for your small business, contact SCORE: “Counselors to America’s Small Business.”
Michael O’Malley is Chairman of the Fairfield County Chapter of SCORE, a nationwide organization formed in 1964 as a nonprofit association dedicated to entrepreneur education and the formation, growth and success of small business. The chapter has more than 90 counselors — men and women with successful business or professional backgrounds — who volunteer their time to help small businesses with free, confidential one-on-one counseling, mentoring, email consultation and low-cost workshop training. For information about starting or operating a small business, contact the SCORE Chapter at 24 Belden Avenue, in Norwalk. www.scorenorwalk.org. Phone: 203-847-7348. Email: SCORE41@aol.com.
Romney rivals make final NH appeals
Tuesday, January 10th, 2012MANCHESTER, N.H. — Knowing Mitt Romney is probably unstoppable in New Hampshire, his Republican presidential rivals took their best shots at roughing him up for the contests ahead in Monday’s fast-paced finale of the campaign for the nation’s first primary.
Romney tried to float above the fray, as if already picked to take on President Barack Obama. But the front-runner stirred up a tempest that was already brewing over his record in the private sector, when he declared “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me.”
Obviously weary, he was talking off the cuff about Americans being able to “fire” their health insurers, but rival Jon Huntsman, for one, seized on the opening, and Democrats quickly circulated the video clip.
“Gov. Romney enjoys firing people, I enjoy creating jobs,” Huntsman told reporters at a Concord, N.H., rally. “It may be that he’s slightly out of touch with the economic reality playing out in America, and that’s a dangerous place for someone to be.”
The former Massachusetts governor, who had practically adopted New Hampshire as his home, preached a free-enterprise ethic and against an interfering government in the final hours before Tuesday’s voting. His GOP opponents quickened their drumbeat of criticism against him.
Declaring “I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament,” Newt Gingrich promised a tougher tone in the race, which he had previewed in weekend debates. “Mitt Romney cannot campaign with a straight face as a conservative,” said the former House speaker, soon to be aided by an ad campaign in South Carolina assailing Romney and his record in the private sector.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry, rocked on his heels by a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses, echoed Gingrich’s line of attack from South Carolina, having passed up the New Hampshire race.
“I have no doubt that Mitt Romney was worried about pink slips — whether he’d have enough of them to hand out,” Perry told several dozen breakfast patrons in Anderson, S.C. That was a slap at Romney’s recent comment that he worried about getting a pink slip during his executive career.
Perry cited South Carolina companies that downsized under the control of Bain Capital, the private equity firm Romney ran, and said it would be an “insult” for Romney to come to the state and ask for voters’ support in easing economic pain.
“He caused it,” Perry said, describing himself as best positioned to untangle the “unholy alliance between Washington and Wall Street.”
Despite that backdrop, Romney chose to liken consumers in the health care market to employers who get to lay people off. “I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” he said in a Nashua speech. “If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need, I want to say, you know, ‘I’m going to get somebody else to provide that service to me.’”
Alone among the half dozen contenders, Perry bypassed New Hampshire. But several others are looking to South Carolina, too, to help level the playing field, conceding Romney’s advantage in his neighborhood.
One of them was Rick Santorum, who came within eight votes of upsetting Romney in Iowa only to find New Hampshire a tough sell.
“Second place would be a dream come true,” Santorum told reporters, who outnumbered supporters on a chilly soccer field in Nashua.
Santorum is hoping his social conservative credentials will serve him better in South Carolina, which votes Jan. 21.
The candidates were all but tripping over each other Monday, concentrating their day in the southern half of New Hampshire, known for holding town-hall meetings in actual town halls.
Ron Paul visited a Manchester diner in the morning, planning to shake hands with patrons, but swiftly departed because of a crush of news camera crews.
The Texas congressman told Fox News his campaign did not plan to contest Florida, which holds its primary Jan. 31, largely for financial reasons. But he said the plan could change if he did well in New Hampshire and South Carolina.
“We have to consider the best way to use our resources,” he said. “We’re still taking one week at a time, one primary at a time.”
Huntsman, who needs a strong New Hampshire performance to stay viable in the race, had perhaps the most frantic pace Monday, with seven stops on his itinerary from Lebanon near the Vermont line to the seacoast.
The former Utah governor visited a Lebanon truck stop and took the phone from an employee behind the counter who was speaking with a milk delivery driver. He said he’s looking for votes wherever he can find them. “I’m the underdog,” he said, a label that applies — at least in New Hampshire — to anyone but Romney.
Gingrich, still smarting from a damaging barrage of negative ads in Iowa by Romney allies, vowed to draw a “very sharp contrast” with Romney, political shorthand for counterattacking. That effort was evident in weekend debates, when the former House speaker upbraided Romney for “pious baloney,” and it will become more so thanks to a new film, sponsored by a political committee supportive of Gingrich, that accuses Romney of “reaping massive awards” at Bain Capital at the expense of companies taken over by the firm.
Gingrich hastened to say he hadn’t seen the film, just as Romney tried to maintain an arm’s length from the anti-Gingrich political committee ads in Iowa. But Gingrich said pointedly that he understands the film looks at “where they apparently looted the companies.”
Romney has bragged about creating more than 100,000 jobs at companies he helped start up or turn around while at Bain but has not substantiated the claim. Gingrich said on NBC’s “Today” show that voters deserve more than that.
“He owes us a report on his stewardship” in the private sector, Gingrich said.
A pro-Gingrich political action committee, Winning Our Future, will purchase .4 million in air time in South Carolina to run ads, said Rick Tyler, a former Gingrich aide who is helping lead the effort.
Gingrich acknowledged he was stepping away from his pledge to run a positive campaign.
“This is not my first preference for how to run the campaign,” he said. “But I don’t believe in unilateral disarmament. And I don’t believe if the other person sets the standard of being very tough that you can back off or you look like you can’t defend yourself.
“And whoever is going to end up competing against Barack Obama is going to have to be very tough.”
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Associated Press writers Brian Bakst in Anderson, S.C., and Holly Ramer, Brian Bakst, Shannon McCaffrey, Philip Elliott and Kasie Hunt in New Hampshire contributed to this report.