A Guaranteed Way For Keeping Your Customers

Sorry that I've been away for a while but the BookPals project has been taking up a heap of my time lately - we are currently working on its phone app and are just about to release Help tutorials and it has been "head's down/bum up" to get these enhancements completed!!!

Saying that, something happened the other day that had memories flooding back to me about a discussion I had with my father almost 30 years ago and I want to share it with you because it guarantees that you will keep your customers coming back for more of your products and services.

Last week I took my son to his annual dental checkup and when we were greeted by his dentist this is how the conversation panned out -

Ben (my son's) Dentist said - "Hi Ben, how are you today?"

Ben said - "Good" (they're real conversationalists at 14 years of age!!! LOL)

Then Ben's dentist said - "And how's your judo going - are you still competing?"

I was just sitting there listening to them and this last comment stopped me dead in my tracks because it brought back memories of a conversation my father had with me more than 3 decades ago.

If you have been following this blog for some time now you will know that my father was a self employed hairdresser.

The one thing that always impressed me about Dad's business was how loyal his customers were - just to give you an example, for years after my father passed away (cancer got him at the ripe old age of 62 back in 1992) Mum was still getting phone calls from customers asking why the shop was shut from people who had moved away from the area years before and now that they were back, the only place that they would get their hair cut was at "Harold's" (my father).

I questioned Dad about why his customers were so loyal many years ago and his answer surprised me - it went something like "It's not the haircuts I give them - they can get that from any hairdresser - it's because I always remember their name and something "special" about them. If you can remember your customer's name and something special about them you'll have a customer for life".

That's why this memory came flooding back to me when I took Ben to his dentist the other day - sure, it's easy for the dentist to remember a name because his client's name is on their client card, but remembering that my son was a judo player from a short conversation they had 12 month's ago really impressed me and needless to say, this same dentist will be Ben's dentist for as long as we live in the area.

Are you taking the time to form these kinds of relationships with your clients and how much more business does doing so bring you?