How to Retain Customers for Life

By Valentine Okolo

Customers will continue to patronize you as long as they continue to have good experiences over and over again. Over the years I have come to realize that building customer loyalty is focused on 3 cardinal points. They are: Product Quality, Service Excellence and Customer Feedback.

1.       Ensure Product Quality Always: Without quality products, it is impossible to retain customers for life. It’s that simple. Customers care about their own satisfaction than they do about the success or failure of the company. To be continually relevant to the customer, you must be innovative and unique.  The least you can do is to ensure you don’t fall below quality standards.

2.       Ensure Service Excellence Always: To ensure service excellence always, you must understand and display a high sense of emotional intelligence always. Emotional intelligence is the ability to learn or understand the feelings of others. When translated to service delivery, emotional intelligence becomes the ability to learn or understand the feelings of your customers. To do this effectively, it becomes imperative that everyone in the organization learns to display a good degree of empathy in discharging service to the customer. Customers are emotionally attached to companies that show them that they care about how they feel and not just about their money. Companies’ that display a high sense of emotional intelligence in service delivery ultimately get rewarded with repeated patronage. In achieving service excellence everyone in the organization must learn to: deliver service promptly and timely, learn to be polite, display high level of empathy, be knowledgeable about company products and services, be conversational and friendly, avoid Offensive Acts that Depict nonchalance, learn the act of managing angry customers and Show professionalism in all situations. A more detailed article on service excellence can be found here: http://valentineokolo.blogspot.com/2014/10/how-to-develop-emotional-intelligence.html

3.       Obtain Feedback: Feedback allows you to determine: whether your clients are totally satisfied with the product or service you’ve rendered ,what your clients may expect as product or service modifications, additional products or services that are required that you may not have been originally aware of and your customer service ratings.

 Article written by Valentine Okolo

5 Tips to Help You Write an Effective Business Plan

By Valentine Okolo

Deciding to start your own business can be one of the most exciting and rewarding decisions you make in your life. A good percentage of new businesses fail today. This is largely due to mismanagement, poor planning and knowledge gap.  In today’s business world, succeeding in a new venture can be quite challenging and demands adequate business planning.

You need a plan in order to make your business idea a reality. If you intend to seek financial support from an investor or financial institution, then bear in mind that a formal written business plan is compulsory. Even if you don't anticipate seeking financial support, a business plan is a tool that can give you clarity about what you hope to achieve and how you plan to do it.

The planning phase is the most critical of all phases to a new business. That is because your business will either blossom or fail due to adequate or poor planning. Researching will also help you in preparing a formidable business plan.

A simple business plan will primarily include:

·         Your business structure,

·         An executive summary,

·         Products and services,

·         Market analysis,

·         Marketing strategy,

·         Management summary,

·         Insurance/Contingency plan and

·         Financial analysis. 

Writing a proper business plan should contain at least the points listed above. Please note that the points listed below are not exhaustive. They are tips considered necessary to help you with sections of your business plan.

So here are 5 basic tips to help you write an effective business plan:

1.      Decide what your goals and objectives in business are: A goal check list will help you identify objectives that need to be met in other for your goals to be achieved.

2.      Invest in proper research: The research you conduct in your small business start-up process will help you immediately figure out questions your business plan has to answer to be successful. For instance, a properly researched business plan will answer these questions amongst other questions: is there a need for your anticipated products/services? Who needs it and where are they located? Are there other companies offering similar products/services now? How much funding will you need and where will you get it? Etc.

3.       Identify what business structure works for what you intend to achieve: Your business can be a sole proprietorship, a partnership, a limited liability company (LLC) or a corporation. Your business structure will largely depend on the type of business you want to venture into, the type of audience you intend to reach, the kind of funding you require etc.

4.      Outline your marketing strategy: This section outlines where your business fits into the market and how you will price, promote and sell your product or service.

5.      Include a market analysis: The market analysis section of your business plan should provide a detailed overview of the industry you intend to sell your product or service in.

Article By Valentine Okolo

Smart Tips for Identifying and Analyzing a Competitor

By Valentine Okolo

Competition includes all the actual and potential rival offerings and substitutes a buyer might consider. Understand that your competitors include actual and potential offerings from industry operators, new entrants, buyers growing bargaining power and suppliers growing bargaining power.

The ability to identify and analyze actual and potential competitors to your business is key to surviving in a fierce market place, keeps you ahead of them and helps you develop strategies to overcome them.

So how do you identify a competitor?

As earlier mentioned, competitors include all the actual, potential substitutes and rival offerings a buyer must consider. This definition suggests that a company’s competitors go beyond any current competitor they know.

For instance, companies operating similar products within a geographical location may consider themselves competitors. However, the advent of a new company with an enviable track record may pose a major challenge to one or all the current players within the market.

In fact, in a fiercely contested market where either buyer patronizes one company, a new company will have to acquire buyers from current players within the market if it is to have any chance of survival.

A company must identify and examine all actual and potential competitors from two angles:

·         Industry Competitors: These are companies offering products and services that can be classified as close substitutes or closely similar to what they currently offer. E.g. Coca cola and Pepsi.

·         Market Competitors: These classes of competitors are often neglected by companies but do have the potential to do exceeding damage to a company. Market competitors satisfy the same market need. For instance, while Coca cola may consider Pepsi an industry competitor, it would have to consider all companies providing drinks that quench the thirst of its consumers as market competitors.

Now how do you analyze your Competitors?

To analyze its competitors, a company must identify its competitor’s strategies, objectives, strengths and weaknesses.

·         Strategy

Investigate their marketing strategy, production strategy and administrative strategy. Examining your competitor’s strategy will tell you where they want their business to go and how they intend to get there. It will also help you construct strategies to combat them.

A good analysis of your competitor’s strategy will tell you:

·         Where they advertise,

·         Who their distributors and suppliers are,

·         What their market share is and who consumes their product and why,

·         Where they enjoy competitive advantage,

·         Who they employ,

·         What new offerings may be in the piping etc.

·         Objectives

Understanding a company’s objectives and its product objectives will tell you what they seek to accomplish in the market place and what drives their behavior. The latter will explain whether they or their products are more profit oriented, market share driven, service driven or the product exits as a strategy to avoid losing share on its major products.

·          Strengths and Weaknesses

Just as you study your strengths and weaknesses, you must also study your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses. For instance, competitors may have a distinct advantage or flaw in technology, human resources, marketing, product quality, market share etc. Knowing where a competitor is strong or weak will help you know where to attack them or how to improve upon your own competencies.

By Valentine Okolo