National Clothesline

Are you the leader in your market? If you are not the leader, do you play follow the leader?

Do you call or visit your competitors and allow them to dictate your business hours, prices and packaging?

Is there a war between your company and your competitors to capture new customers?

John Wooden said, “It is what

you learn after you know it all that counts.

What kind of businessperson are you? Do you know it all before investigating? Do you allow the competition to be the leader and choose the battlefield of a business war?

Yes, business can be a war, a war between you and your competition. I recently spoke with a Minnesota drycleaner who was shocked when his previously friendly competitor sent sales people into his business area.

Who was dictating business conditions on their drycleaning battlefield for customers?

Prior to the sale of my company, I put coupons on many supermarket cash register tapes. I negotiated exclusivity so no other cleaner could have his or her coupon on those tapes.

There was a market next door to my biggest competitor. Of course, I put my ad in that market. For some reason he thought it was okay for his company to mail advertising into my area, but he felt I should not advertise next door to him.

Down the street from my best location was a vacant store with lots of parking. Rumor had it that another drycleaner was investigating the site. Directly in front of that store was a bus bench that had no advertising on it. I put my ad on that bus bench. A cleaner never rented the location.

A new cleaner opened up a few blocks south of that same location. One week prior to his grand opening, I sent out a huge mailing to our zip code with some terrific offers. In less than two years, his doors were closed. I will always fight to keep my existing customers and battle to get new customers.

You are the commander-in-chief of your company and can dictate the battlefield or allow the competition to do so. Pro-active or reactive is your choice. Take the high ground and dominate the neighborhood or allow your competitor to defeat you? What will it be?

To be a leader in your geographic area you have to determine who has the highest sales volume.

If it is you, then you are always under attack and you have to defend your position.

If you are not the leader, you need to investigate everything the highest volume company does that you do or not do, and then you have to do it better.

Doing things the same way your competition does will not work. You must outshine the competitor’s company in every imaginable fashion.

The quality of the customer service your clients receive will be crucial in the battle to become the leader. In a recent international survey, only 3 percent of the consumers described the service they received as excellent.

Think about that number. When was the last time you surveyed your customers?

In that same international survey 47 percent of the respondents felt that the expected quality of service was met either sometimes, rarely or never. That is a terrible number.

Six out of ten people (60 percent) in that survey changed vendors within the prior year due to poor customer service. Have you measured your customer retention? How many new customers have you kept in the last year?

Are you simply rolling over your customer database? Are you losing customers as fast as you are gaining them?

In that same survey, one-third (33 percent) of the customers indicated that in the last year they had increased expectations of the vendors they dealt with.

Over half (50+ percent) said their expectations increased during the prior five years. What are you doing to increase the quality of your customer service?

Over 58 percent of consumers say that customer service is the deciding factor in choosing a new service supplier.

The final number, and the one that really must be heard, is that over three quarters (75 percent) of the consumers say they will not change as long as they have good quality customer service experiences.

Use secret shoppers to determine what your counter staff is doing and how they are doing it. Are your customers receiving the service you think they are? If you have not had your business secret-shopped, you are in for a new experience.

Unless you are at your counter all day, every day, you do not know what is going on. You do not know how your customers are being greeted or treated.

After you have secret-shopped your business, secret-shop your biggest competitor or competitors. Learn how they grade out compared to your staff. I am proud to say that in a national secret-shop, my staff finished second. The drycleaning company that beat us wrote the test, so I did not feel too bad.

In many cases, the first contact a new customer has is the telephone. I have called many drycleaners and when the counter staff answers the telephone, I can tell immediately what kind of business is being operated.

I am sad to say the majority of counter staff personnel throughout the USA are not properly trained to answer a telephone. The typical answer is, “Hello XYZ Cleaners” and sometimes you do not even get the “Hello,” you get “XYZ Cleaners.”

Install the following telephone answering rules for your sales staff.

• Greet the customer with Good Morning, Good Afternoon, Good Evening or perhaps on a holiday, Happy Valentine’s Day.

• Identify themselves to the customer. As an example, “Good morning XYZ Cleaners, this is Harvey, how can I help you?” The persons calling learn they have reached the correct company and have the name of the person they are dealing with.

There is not a reason in the world your CSR cannot greet the customer, identify your company, and identify himself or herself to the caller.

Finally, if the customer must be put on hold do not keep the customer waiting for an extended period of time. Get the customer’s name and number and call back within a promised length of time.

CRM: remember those three letters. In a customer centric market, they are or will become crucial to the growth of your company. Use of your database to deal with clients is now one of the primary tools for business growth.

Think about all of the data you have in your computer. You can find out frequency of visits, amounts of money spent, and the kind of services that you provide for the customers. You will know where most of your customers live and that will give you entrée into the demographics of that particular area.

If you are not taking advantage of the information you have at the tip of your fingers, you are not using the equipment you own efficiently. This is like owning two drycleaning machines and only using one because you are too lazy to turn the power on for the second machine.

With all of the information you have you can tailor your marketing to keep the high volume customers and increase your sales volume. There are experts in the field of CRM. Avail yourself of their ability to derive information from your database and discover a completely new world of marketing.

You do not want to be a follower. Will you be the technology leader or is a competitor going to beat you to the punch and win the war for customers? That should be an easy decision for you to make. If you can not make that decision contact me and we can make it together.