Some Thoughts
About Your Business
Recession and Your Customers
We're in a recession. It's a time of stress and change for everyone.
Your customers find they are in tight cash situations. Their needs and expectations for their own businesses and of those who supply products and services to them are changing rapidly. This means your customers will think twice before purchasing your product or service and will want something different from you than they did just a short time ago.
With their revenues shrinking, your competitors will be even more aggressive in going after your customers to build their share of a smaller market at your expense.
To be successful in times like these you need to realign your business to those changed customer needs and imperatives. Not to do this could result in loss of your customers' business and even losing some of them.
The best way succeed is to meet your customer's needs better than you've ever done it before. How can you meet his or her needs better than anyone else? What has changed for your customers and what are the changes you need to make accordingly? The way to find out is to talk with your customers and ask about changing expectations. Then you can make your own changes to meet these changing conditions.
This will have three outcomes:
- You will know what you need to do to meet customers' changed expectations;
- You will erect hurdles for your competitors; and,
- Your customers will know how much you care about them and increase their loyalty, especially critical in these difficult times.
This is also a good time to contact your competitors' customers to find out about their new needs - and meet them! It's a great way to get their business.
It may be useful to use an outside firm to get and analyze feedback from your customers. That independent analysis can assure you get the whole story and look at it in the fresh way these times require.
Doing this simple thing — asking your customers and your competitors' customers how their needs and expectations have changed — will help assure your success in these difficult times.