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4. Speak about relations between companies and their customers. Is it more important to attract new customer or to retain the exiting ones?

Ones of the most important aspect company should remember about to be profitable is the relationship with the customers. I suppose key factor in building good business relationship with the customers is the trust. And, in order, to gain trust you must be order and you must be clear. The restless customer of 21^st century does no have time and there are a million other providers, all ready to sell to that customer. Company can present its product by brochures, pamphlets, flyers, e-mail and videos, but in every way it must be clear to understand the essence very quickly. The speed of information, the speed of respond - it must be explicit and fast.

After that, in my opinion, we can define success in business as attracting and retaining clients. Such point of view is not original but in practice many companies forget about retaining and concentrate only on attracting new customers. Such mistake can cost to business huge amount of money annually. It has been estimated that the average company loses between 10 and 30 per cent every year. In constantly changing market this is not surprising. What is surprising is the fact that few companies have any idea how many customers they have lost.

Only now are organizations beginning to wake up to their lost opportunities and calculate the financial implication. So in the US, Domino’s Pizzas estimates that a regular customer is worth more than 5000 over ten years. And if you lose the customer in cause of bad service or low quality product, you lose not only these thousands of dollars but also new potential customers and new potential revenue. Because we know that customer treated badly will tell their tales of woe to up to 20 people, in contrast, customer receiving good service will stimulate business by telling up to 12 other persons. Many companies now are beginning to refer to this really seriously. So Rank Xerox takes the question of retaining customer as a key part of the company’s bonus scheme.

Furthermore, researches suggest that there is a high degree of correlation between customer retention and profitability. Established customers tend to buy more and usually cost less to service than new customer. Parallel to this, they tend to be less price sensitive, and may provide free word-of-mouth advertising and referrals. Retaining customers also makes it difficult to competitors to enter a market or increase their share of market.

Summarizing this information, I suggest that it’s of cause very and very important to attract new customer, but it only part of problems and usually it’s less expensive and more profitable to retain your customers.