Published in the Independence Daily Reporter, August 10, 2016
Conventional thinking is that people always want the lowest price no matter what, yet some of the most successful businesses I know don’t have the lowest prices for what they sell. What do customers really want?
Businesses, large and small, all too often get caught up in a “race to the bottom” trying to drive their prices down to be lower than a.) The local competitor, b.) The box stores or c.) The Internet. At the same time, they strive to offer the best in customer service. The challenge is that it is nearly economically impossible to offer both, lowest price and best in service. The skimpy profit margins of lowest prices simply won’t support the costs required to provide the best customer service. There are a percentage of customers, probably somewhere between 20% and 40% that will always buy at the lowest price yet expect the best service. They usually expect more than is reasonable for that lowest price and they can be most difficult. I’ll call them the “B” customers. Then there are the “A” customers, those of us that want a certain value included in the products and services we buy and we realize that usually means we won’t get that value by looking for the lowest price on earth.
Businesses should realize they’re not going to get 100% of the market anyway, so their efforts are better spent in attracting the “A” customers. As an “A” customer myself, I think I can give a fairly accurate representation of what we want. First and foremost, we want a solution to a problem. Our problem might be that we want a great dining experience, that we need to find a gift for someone or that we need to fix or replace a broken something in our home or business.
We want to feel safe, welcome and comfortable while looking for a solution to whatever problem we’re trying to solve. We want to be respected and we’d like the business—owner and/or employees—to be attentive to our needs and really try to understand and solve the problem we’re asking them about. This includes being friendly with us no matter what kind of day it’s been. If we need to “go” while we’re shopping, we don’t want the awkwardness of having to ask when we’ve seen the NO PUBLIC RESTROOM sign on the door. We want to get what we’ve been promised and we love it when we get more than we’ve been promised. We also love it when we receive ideas that lead to better solutions than we originally had in mind. When we receive these things, we’ll gladly pay a bit extra for the goods and services we need. We’ll drive past competitors that don’t give us these things. When we can get these things locally, we’ll gladly shop at home. It’s only when we can’t find these things locally that we’ll get them elsewhere.
Jim Correll 