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Is the Customer Always Right?

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Consumers and company owners alike are familiar with one of the most well-known sayings in business: the customer is always right. This saying has been used for years on end. It is most often attributed to the Marshall Field’s Department Store (which later became Macy’s), and Harry Gordon Selfridge who worked for Field at the turn of the 20th century and later founded Selfridges, a high-end department store. These two individuals clearly experienced profound business success, which goes to suggest that perhaps there might be some truth or worth in the old saying as a rule to go by. But what does this phrase actually mean and does it ring true in the modern day commercial field? Here’s everything you need to know.

What Does “The Customer is Always Right” Actually Mean?

“The customer is always right” generally suggests that whatever the customer says goes. After all, they’re the one who has final control over the completion of a sale and the turnover of a business’ profit. It’s fairly clever. Think about it. If a business declares that the customer is always, consumers are more likely to believe that they will receive high-end, high-quality service when shopping with said company. It also encourages staff members to offer the best customer service possible, doing everything in their power to meet customer needs. The success off this can be found in any feedback left on your customer focused ecommerce platform.

oes This Ring True?

Now, there are varied opinions on whether this is the best approach to take towards running a business. After all, nobody is ever truly “always right”. Here are the main arguments for and against implementing this ideology to your own company and the way that it is managed and run.

The Customer Is Always Right

You can learn a whole lot from your customers. After all, they are the individuals purchasing what you’re putting out there on the market. One area where customers are almost always right is demand. You need to take a look at what your customers want and cater to their wishes. This is why market research and customer feedback are so important! These are two methods of directly interacting with your potential customers and existing customers alike. By understanding what they’re looking for in products and services, you can tick all of their boxes, which means that they will be much more likely to invest in what you have to offer. Feedback following their purchase and experience with your company also allows you to make changes to your current practice, constantly improving your brand and what it is putting out there into the consumer market! Never underestimate the value of your customers’ opinions and suggestions.

The Customer Isn’t Always Right

Nowadays, customers tend to be a bit more savvy with the business process. You no longer need to be a business owner to know the tricks of the trade. Think about it: anyone can read up on business practice and process, learning what extremes companies will go to in order to maintain a contented and loyal customer base. More abrasive customers will actively use this to their advantage, purposefully complaining and feigning dissatisfaction as they know that by doing so they can get something for nothing. This isn’t all too surprising. After all, if someone knows that they can make use of a service and then receive it for free at a discounted rate simply by uttering a complaint, then a whole lot of people will give it a go. Sure, this isn’t exactly moral. But there are plenty of people out there who want something for nothing and will take advantage. If your company’s policies are too lax or lenient, they will be abused. Sometimes it may actually prove more beneficial for you to put your foot down and lose a customer who isn’t actually bringing much profit to you than to pander to their demands and hand over your wares for free. Certain people cannot be pleased, no matter how much time or effort you put into making things good for them. That or they will be pleased but won’t express their contentment for their own benefit. You should also prioritise good staff members. Demanding or abrasive customers may talk down to your staff or act in an aggressive or inappropriate manner. To suggest that the customer is always right would be to condone this kind of behaviour and marginalise your staff members who work hard to keep your company and brand afloat. Instead, weigh up each situation individually and determine the best outcome on the facts at hand. It is always best to be fair.

As you can see, there isn’t a clear “yes” or “no” answer to the customer always being right debate. The key to success is to take each case individually, assessing it and making an informed decision each time.

How to create a buzz around your brand

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If your business is going to be a success, it is vital that you get people talking about your brand. This is an extremely effective way for you to generate sales and to stand out from your industry peers. In a competitive market, you can’t afford to sit back and wait for people to come to you. For advice on how to improve your company’s brand, read five suggestions for creating a buzz around your brand.

Invest in your branding

Make sure that you have a deep understanding of what your brand represents. You need to be aware of your core company values, along with your ambitious goals for the future. You also need to make sure that your audience is on board with your branding. Why not work with a professional team to create something that you can be proud of? Establishing an interesting and exciting brand is the first step towards creating a buzz around your business; you want to be different, and attract your demographic of choice.

Promote special offers

You should also make the most of any opportunity to promote special offers. Perhaps you could offer a discount code to your most loyal customers. Maybe you could introduce a seasonal sale of your products. Or, alternatively, you could hold a flash sale that you promote via social media. The most important thing is that you provide your audience with a strong reason to engage with your company. They should always feel as though it is in their best interests to pay attention to your brand.

Create your own lifestyle brand

Instead of simply selling products or services, you should try to sell a lifestyle. This is an especially effective technique in the age of social media. Your audience wants something that they can aspire to; something that will make their lives better. Say you are a company that sells beachwear. You should invest in a social media campaign that creates a story about your brand, or you should network and connect with other brands for collaboration. For example, why not visit Jet Surf NY and ask to team up? Then, you could take amazing action shots to share online, promoting one another’s brand and product.

Work with other companies

You should also consider working with other businesses to build momentum. This will give you the opportunity to pool your resources and attract more attention to your brand. Just make sure that you are careful about the companies that you associate with. Working with the wrong people could result in your brand standing out for all of the wrong reasons.

Get your staff involved

In business, it is vital that you view your staff as an important marketing tool. You need to remember that your workers are representing your company at all times. That is why you should do everything in your power to help them promote your brand. You should also ensure that your employees enjoy working for your company. This will help them to be more enthusiastic when talking to potential clients, contacts, employees, and investors.

How to Recruit High Quality Staff

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When it comes to recruiting high quality staff, there are several key points to keep in mind. No matter what industry you are in, your business is only as good as the key people you have hired. In other words, your staff can make or break you, so keep this in mind when hiring. So then, how do you go about recruiting high quality staff? These tips may help.

Begin with Accurate and Thorough Job Descriptions

It is hard to find the right person for the right job if you haven’t made it perfectly clear what that job entails. You will be getting a smattering of applicants who are highly qualified and really top in their field, but they may not be what you are looking for at all. This is the first step in recruitment. Know what you are looking for.

Develop and Post Recruitment Ads

Once you have accurately defined the job description, it’s time to draft and post an ad. This is an important part of the recruitment process as well. It may pay to hire a writer to craft a well-written ad, but it is also important to know where you are most likely to find high quality recruits.

Industry journals are a good beginning, but there are online job postings as well. Sites like monster.com get a huge amount of traffic and if your job description is on the mark and if your ad is well-written, you are likely to attract the cream of the crop.

Look Carefully at Education and OJT Training

Say, for example, you manage a dental office and are seeking a high quality dental assistant. The dentists on staff don’t have time to train assistants and you are getting busier by the day. Do you want to hire a recruit that worked for another dental office or would you rather have one who graduated from a top caliber school listed on best-dentalassistantschools.com?

Perhaps you can have the best of both worlds. Find a graduate with high grades who has some experience in the field under his or her belt. It all begins with the quality of training each candidate has received. OJT dental assistant recruits may have had poor or insufficient training, so keep that in mind if you are hiring in a state that does not require formal licensure.

Don’t Settle for a Single Interview

Altogether too often employers settle for the candidate they liked best on the first interview. That can be a grave error in judgment. Some highly-qualified applicants may be having an off day for one reason or another and some candidates less-qualified might just be good at interviewing.

Some companies bring applicants through a series of interviews, each with a different interviewer. At the end, the best applicants are brought before the team of interviewers. The candidate/s chosen are then, brought back one final time where they are formally hired and led through the onboarding process. It may sound like a lot of extra effort, but you can never be too careful.

Hiring the wrong candidate costs time and money and that’s something you don’t have to spare. Save yourself major frustrations by getting it right the first time.

Important Lessons You Can Learn from Past Successful Products

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In business, success is never a one-time achievement. You want to reach the level of success you aim for and then stay at that level – if not advance further – to remain successful. It is not uncommon for businesses to revise their objectives every few years; some even do it every year.

Maintaining success is often more difficult than becoming successful in the first place. You now have something to lose as the leader of the market. In this article, we are going to look at the important lessons about maintaining success from products that were successful on the market.

Always Listen to the Customers

The moment you stop listening to the customers is the moment you will start failing on the market. Just because you have a successful product, doesn’t mean you can keep customers happy without doing anything. This is a trap that may businesses have fallen for in the past, and one that you should never fall victim to today.

You only need to look at the iPod 6th-Generation review on ArgyllFreePress.com to know what I’m talking about. The iPod was one of the most successful lines of products on the market. The iPod 6 is at the top of that long history, offering incredible performance to people who didn’t need an iPhone.

Unfortunately, there were some important market demands that the iPod didn’t meet. The lack of better DAC and the fact that some apps will not even work on the iPod disappointed some avid fans of the product. Apple failed to listen to its customer base, turning the iPod 6 into a mixed bag of success and failure on the market.

Learn and Innovate

Success is often considered the most dangerous comfort zone of them all. Once you are successful – or see yourself as being successful – you start feeling more and more comfortable about the position. It doesn’t take long before the lure of being in a comfort zone gets to you.

We’ve had so many cases of market giants being defeated because of this issue. Toyota took over the American market from GM. Samsung started winning in Asian markets with new and innovative products. The same occurrences can even be seen in competitions between small businesses and startups.

Be Flexible

There is no sure-fire way to maintain success. You can’t have a strategy and expect it to remain effective on the face of market changes. You can’t be stubborn and stick to the old ways when there is a certain need for change.

Be flexible. Being flexible is one of the most important keys to maintaining success. It goes hand in hand with the need to learn and innovate; the business has to remain agile and you as the entrepreneur need to promote that agility.

The only thing that must never change is the “why”; the main reason why you entered the market in the first place. It is the heart of the business. Stick to your principles, use the tips we covered in this article, and stay successful for longer, even in today’s volatile market.

Smart Strategies for a More Effective Business

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Running a business is a difficult thing to do. It is even more difficult to do when you are not running your business as effectively as it should be. When your business processes are sub-standard, it means that you are doing more work than you need to, while at the same time producing worse results. The successful business is one that can look at itself, find its weaknesses, and work on improving them. A successful business is one that works on becoming more effective, and one that constantly strives to improve. This is particularly important with how fast new innovations and trends take hold of each and every industry. If you cannot keep up, then you fall behind.

To ensure that your company is as successive and effective as possible, adopt these smart strategies today:

Create a New Business Plan

Though you should have already created a business plan when you first started, it’s important to periodically create new reports. That way you can stay on top of trends, on changes, and can ensure that your company moves forward in the right direction. Creating a new business plan is also an excellent opportunity to analyze and reflect on your current business strategies and work on improving them.

You need to know where your weak points are if you can ever hope to succeed, which is why you should conduct a SWOT analysis as soon as possible. SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and it can be vital to drafting a successful business plan. Without this analysis, you cannot move forward and you cannot fix areas that are holding you and your company back.

Improve Work Productivity

When you or your team waste too much time trying to find a document, you are being inefficient. This inefficiency means more important things are held off, that your money isn’t going towards bettering your company, and that you workforce is too slow. Instead, improve your systems to that work can be done quickly and easily. This means using management tools, and training your employees so that they use the same methods to store and retrieve data.

Other ways you can improve your productivity is to actually improve how well you treat your employees. For instance, having a great break room can actually help you improve how well they work when they are on the job. Further if you have cooking means so that your employees can bring food from home (even if it’s a ready-meal), it means that they aren’t wasting money eating out, and aren’t ruining their health with the fatty, salty foods that are available.

Other ways you can improve your employee’s productivity is to give them more incentive. When your employees see your success as theirs, they will work harder for you. Do this by making them feel valued. Give them rewards once they reach milestones, listen to their suggestions and give them genuine responses, and treat them every once in a while. Even something as simple as taking a team who has done well out for lunch can help boost morale and make your office a great place to be. The more you care about your employees, the more they will care about you.

Save Money Wherever You Can

It is a huge mistake to simply accept the first product or replacement that a supplier offers you. By rule, they will want to sell you the most expensive option they have. They want to do this because it means better business for them, but it isn’t a good way to run your business more effectively. Instead, take quotes from several suppliers or businesses, and always try to haggle down.

A great way to save money is by doing price comparisons. That way you get the best deal, even if the product is the same. That is why businesses should visit Side By Side Reviews. That way you can ensure to get the best deal.

Getting the best deal in other areas of business, however, requires a lot of cunning and negotiation. One of the best ways to do this is to be extremely effective in your networking. People help out their friends, and when you network effectively, you become friends with all the right people. Remember to be genuine, and to offer help first. You cannot expect others to do favors for you when you are not willing to do the same in return.

Build a Community

When it comes to your customers, the notion of networking remains the same. You need to be genuine, you need to have a certain “personality” and you need to give before you can hope for them to buy from you. If you don’t work on building relationships with your customers, then you are working extra hard for each and every sale.

Build a community that not only like your products or services, but who also enjoy you as a company. Many companies have seen their public image increase substantially from good PR. Have an effective enough company persona, and people will follow your social accounts for the joy of it. When that happens, you benefit from word-of-mouth, from increased SEO, and from becoming a household name.

Build a community, because when you do you have a circle of repeat customers and a circle of those who will recommend you to their friends and family. Word-of-mouth advertising is the most effective way to get new sales, because we trust our friends. In order to nurture this community, you need to provide great content and even better customer service.

How you treat your customers will dictate how well you are received, but you need to remember that customers are rather savvy; if you are a large business without any bad reviews, for instance, you are immediately suspicious. Don’t delete the negative reviews you receive, but instead respond to them in a courteous manner. This is especially important in a public forum, because it shows other potential customers how well you deal with complaints.

Being a more effective business means working better – it could even mean working less! Don’t bog your business down with inefficient policies or out-of-date practices. Reevaluate, and innovate.