SatE: CUSTOMER SERVICE AND CUSTOMER LOYALTY

 Taking care of detail

As an entrepreneur it is important for you to use your skills to entice your customer’s interests and loyalty. This can be done by exercising elite customer service, to both your external customer and internal customers. Customer service can be seen as making and ordinary transaction or visit to a business premises into a good experience.  An entrepreneur should be able to reflect their attributes towards their internal staff so that their staff can do the same thing to the external customers.

Internal customers are employees of an organisation this is because employees can be said to be internal customers of their colleagues, they treat their colleagues as external staff. To be a successful entrepreneur you need to make your customers feel as though you’re worth every penny. An entrepreneur is only as good as their customers make them. So in order to do this an entrepreneur needs to understand how to satisfy customers.

A customer can be satisfied if their expectations are low, this means that if the customer gets what they are expecting they will be a satisfied, but is an entrepreneur gives them more than what they expect form a service or transaction the customer will feel wow, this is the basics of elite customer service. An entrepreneur can do this by providing good customer service systems that enable them organisation to make detail undertaking of activities that the customer may be involved in. There are many ways in which entrepreneurs can do this:

·         Offer services to different types of customers such as customer groups

·         Cater for special needs customers

·         Implement various activities for customers

·         Support various customers in different ways

·         Multifunctionalise the firm (the firm having various functions to suit customers)

The benefits of caring for internal customers       

Caring and respecting the internal customers’ is key in a business. According to the KBV (knowledge based view) knowledge is the most important asset in a business and the internal customer provides the business with the human resources, knowledge an example of a firm that uses this would be 3M which thrives on different innovative ideas to create technology. The human resources or internal customers also have needs that have to be met by the business. The staffs need to be satisfied and happy with the business environment they're working in, physically as well as mentally; a healthy environment should be present for the internal customers. The staff should be trained to help them acquire the confidence to tackle new situations, the internal customer would also feel good about themselves as well as, feel they're part of a team. The internal customer for example staff served by other staff in an organizational hierarchy structure would benefit from good customer care.

Companies such as Tesco M&S and even Microsoft value customers this is because by showing value to customers, the customers will feel more inclined to patronise the firm more and this increases repeat business as well as customer loyalty. Firms such as Tesco have created the structure of their entire business to suite the requirements of their customers because it is in the best interests of the entrepreneur as well as the organisation to have satisfied customers. Tesco has multi-formatted their firm  by introducing a multi-formatted service structure, according to the location (community),demographic profile and buying behaviours, the business could easily divide itself to suit different communities. The segmentation could specialise in the needs of the community around the business for example, Tesco has four different store formats, and each tailored to customers' needs;

Tesco express: which offers customers great value, quality and fresh food close to where they live. This format is placed to act as a general food, wine, spirits and baked commodities, convenience store. These stores are up to 3,000 sq ft. 

Tesco metro: these stores are bigger than the Tesco express stores and are usually located in shopping centres in the city or towns. Metros cater for thousands of busy customers each week and offer a tailored range of food lines, including ready-meals and sandwiches. These stores are approximately 7,000-15,000 sq ft.

Tesco superstore: Are larger than the metro stores and are located where customers are densely concentrated. These stores have none food products which include items such as DVDs and books and are approximately 20,000-50,000 sq ft. 

Tesco extra: these are the largest stores. These one stop department stores offer the widest range of food and non-food lines, ranging from electrical equipment to home wares, clothing, health and beauty and seasonal items such as garden furniture. These stores are approximately 60,000 sq ft and above.

Businesses similar to Tesco such as Bloomsbury have a similar customer service structures to help customers in the best way possible, the similarity of these structures are caused by the common factors that influence the business, which have been mentioned before. Within my desk research I noticed that most of these medium/large companies don’t publicize their structural information, they tend to keep it internal as part of their policies.