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Creating Loyal Customers is essential to the long term sustainability of any business in any industry.

The statistics are incredible. Studies show Loyal Customers come back more often spend more money each visit and talk about and promote your business to four to five times more people than a satisfied customer does. Loyal Customers even complain less. And for every dollar you spend keeping a loyal customer, it costs the typical business 5 dollars for a new customer. Loyal Customers, gotta love ‘em!

So how do you create loyal customers?

There are 3 essential connections that need to be understood.

o Points of Connection

o Personnel Connection

o Emotional Connection

What are points of connection? Points of connection will be every point where you’re customer (or prospective customer) comes into contact with your business. Points of connection include (but certainly not limited to) your website, your phone system, your location and so on. Every point of connection should be an easy to use, positive experience for your customer. If you’re a restaurant, you can have the best food in the world, but if the hostess is rude, you have degraded the experience for your customer. If the client has to go through a complicated phone tree to get to a real person that could be a real turn off. If your website is difficult to go thru or has old information, that could cause a problem in people’s perception of your business. All of the above mentioned make it more difficult for your customer in becoming a Loyal Customer.

Each point of connection needs to be (at the bare minimum) a neutral event, best if a positive experience. As each positive experience builds on other positive experiences, you expose the possibility of creating a Loyal Customer.

I did not type incorrectly when I typed Personnel Connection. Yes, personal connection is important and I’ll talk about it in step 3. Traditionally, when we think of customer service, we usually are focused on the front line people, those in front of the customer. However when you are talking about raising the bar and creating Loyal Customers, the personnel that need to be involved is everyone. Yes, everyone. CEO, Executive team, maintenance staff, tech geeks, back office staff, everyone. Here’s why.

Let’s start with the tech geeks. If they are in charge of the website, would a strong focus on creating loyal customers change the way they may look at working their website? Right now, they are probably disconnected. What you often see in companies is a constant back and forth between the tech folks and the customer service folks on making a customer-centric website. What a waste of time, money and meetings. And while that’s going on, you’re turning off the people you need most - customers. A customer loyalty focused staff resolves the issues before they even become a problem. This is true of any department.

How about the executive management team? After all, about once or twice a year, “customer service” becomes the topic of the moment and then satisfied that people get it, they move on to something else. Yet a couple months later, out comes a new corporate policy that has the front line people shaking their heads knowing that they just made it more difficult to work with their clients. It happens all the time. The executive team is so focused on bottom line results that they aren’t looking at the fact that they may drive customers away. Folks, customers are the bottom line results.

All’s you need to do is look at the industry leaders. Those company’s that continually produce results in good times and bad. They may not be flashy, but they are consistent. Look closer and you’ll see an organization that strives for creating loyal customers from the board room to the break room.

The third Connection is the Emotional Connection. Think of the places or businesses YOU feel loyalty to, whether it’s a restaurant, clothing store or even a particular hardware store. Is it an emotional connection? You bet it is! The fact is the vast majority of consumers want to be loyal; we love (an emotional word there!) having a favorite place or business. If nothing else, it makes our life easier. Loyal to an airline? Makes travel arrangements easier. Loyal to a restaurant? Guess where I’m taking guests from out of town. Loyal to a supply company? It’s so much easier than having to hunt for a new one each time.

Once you create that emotional connection where people like (dare I say love?) doing business with you and feel valued in return, it becomes increasingly more difficult for your competitor’s to whisper sweet nothings and take their business away.

By creating positive experiences with your business at every point of connection, internally creating a totally customer-centric operation and creating a relationship of respect and value, an emotional connection, you create a relationship more profitable, less problems and ultimately more satisfying to all parties concerned.

What a great connection to make!

Whenever we start hearing a recession is around the corner, we start having shivers along the spine: will the company downsize if there are not enough sales? Will I be let go? The good news is there is a way to break free from the fear cycle.

Newspapers these days are filled with stories of how the dollar is weak, how the stock exchange has been plummeting and the dark shadow of massive lay off starts flying over us.

While not everybody will lose his or her job, and in fact we don’t know if ANYONE is going to even in face of the upcoming economic recession, you might still hold fears. The fear of losing your job is more real to you than what any economist or politician can say.

I can’t predict if you in particular will be let go, but I do know that you, yes you, in particular, can get over that fear.

There is one secret here to cope with any uncertainty you might face: fear is not only not going to help you, but in fact can destroy all your chances for success.

Now, I’m not saying you have to go out into the world thinking you are Superman. What I am saying is that fear is not going to help you.

From my own experience I know that fear kept me from planning when I was laid off of one job. I knew the company was downsizing, my post was cancelled and I was transferred to another department. My days were counted but I was paralyzed in fear. Eventually I was downsized myself. The economy was in ruins and my attitude was too.

What could I have done differently? Maybe not much inside that company. That was (and is) beyond my -or your- control. But I could have planned had I not be so scared of the future.

Every company, specially the big ones, have a crisis plan to implement when something bad happens. As an employee, nobody told you how you could prepare in case a crisis arised in your life.

Planning at this particular stage, when the recession is just about to start, gives you an immense advantage. Start thinking now what are you going to do if your job, if your company, is no longer there.

Here are some questions for you to start you thinking:

Planning for the worst reduces your incertitude and that gives you peace of mind. It doesn’t mean you have to focus on the worst. There’s a lot on the Law of Attraction out there teaching how not to focus on what you don’t want to happen. My advice is that you see it from an objective point of view so if that scenario ever comes for whatever reason, you are ready to implement your plan and have some answers ready.

Any company, irrespective of its size, is incomplete without a good accounting department. In fact, it is a verity that accounting is rather the most important segment of a company. Right from dealing the financial tasks to the estimation of profit, everything is the sole responsibility of the accounting department. Hence, these important responsibilities make it necessary for the company to hire competent experts for managing the accounts and other financial transactions. However, you may often get to witness the incapability of your in-house staff because of heavy work load, less number of accountants and other such reasons. Such situations can hamper the efficiency of your company, which in turn may hinder your growth and to surpass this hassle, technology advancements have given us the proficient option of outsourcing. Nowadays, the market is full of such outsourcing firms that are ready to take care of all sorts of account related affairs. One such keen and highly acclaimed organization is accounting in New York.

Miscomputing, false or missing entries in the account of the company can lead to an entirely wrong calculation that is performed for estimating the financial growth rate of the year. Proper record of profit and loss has is very important for analyzing the future aspects of the firm. After all, this will decide whether the company is making fruitful deals or going in loss. Accounting New York professionals understand the requirements of your business and according to those; they formulate their services so that you can make the most of it. They scrutinize every detail of your accounts to create the most profitable financial statements. The experts at accounting New York lay a great stress on accurate data entries, good work mechanism and on time submission of the work. For all reasons, they are one among the most reliable and in demand accounting service providers.

Accounting in New York is definitely a promising and reliable source for managing the account related jobs as many companies both big and small who are in association with them, are consistently making profit with considerable rate of development. All the professionals of this firm are tested through examination and only if they manage to secure mentioned marks, they are awarded with the license to work. So, stay assured of the fact that your work is done by experts who are well qualified, experienced and avid workers always ready in action to serve you with the best results. However, for not leaving even a single scope for doubts, you may check for their work performance and authentication on Internet.

Therefore, now you have a better solution to escape yourself from the torturous burden of tallying entries, solving huge calculations and creating reports. The assistance of accounting New York will let you focus on other features of your company with more concentration. The experts will also take care of your future plans by providing you with useful information of facts and data whenever required, along with the detailed presentation of your previous deals. Now, the accounting assistance is a basic necessity of the companies rather than the added advantage.