Make every customer experience rewarding

In the current economic climate engendering customer loyalty has never been more important. Finding good customers is hard and potentially expensive (assuming a level of spend on marketing, training etc) and so keeping them is essential to generate a return on that investment. In many businesses, and optics is no different (especially when you consider the loss-leader status of the eye exam and the average practice’s ‘no-glasses’ rate), that return is unlikely to come from the first visit but from the patient coming back again and again for many years – the so-called lifetime value.

A study that analysed the costs and revenues derived from serving customers over their entire purchasing life cycle (Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services, Harvard Business Review, September-October 1990.) showed that in industry after industry, the high cost of acquiring customers renders many customer relationships unprofitable during their early years. Only in later years, when the cost of serving loyal customers falls and the volume of their purchases rises, do relationships generate big returns. The bottom line: increasing customer retention rates by 5 per cent increases profits by 25 per cent to 95 per cent.