The best way to compete with your competition and drive them crazy is to make your customers happy. To make your customers happy you need to focus on them. If you always focus on your existing customers you may never need to worry about your competition again.
“My way of fighting the competition is the positive approach. Stress your own strengths, emphasize quality, service, cleanliness and value and the competition will wear itself out trying to keep up.” -Ray Kroc, Founder of McDonald’s
While traveling to one of my speaking engagements, I stayed at a Hyatt Regency Resort Hotel on the beach and noticed how they focused on making their customers happy, all the while making their competition suffer. While walking around the Hotel I was amazed to see that there were free washers and dryers in the laundry rooms. Someone certainly thought about their customer’s needs and wants.
I witnessed moms and dads washing their children’s clothes that were filled with sand, sunscreen, chlorine from the pool and salt water from the ocean. What a great amenity to have for families traveling with young children. Few hotels would even consider laundry rooms because they take up space and reduce the amount of revenue that a hotel-done laundry can generate. Their decision to make washers and dryers free is monumental and will surely make their family customers happy.
By focusing on the needs and wants of its customers, rather than nickel-and-diming them, the Hyatt Hotel communicates something of incredible importance in a very competitive beach resort destination. They care! How easy and Magical is that?
What are your doing in your business to make your customers happy or even happier? Here are some questions to ask?
- Take a look at the small items you charge your customers and see if it would be in the customer’s best interest to not charge them at all. Chalk it up as the cost of doing business.
- What extras do you charge your customers that you can just provide for free or to go along with their main purchased item? For example: Why does a restaurant charge extra for anchovies to go along with a salad?
- What little extras can you add to your customer’s experience that would create a surprise “Wow” affect?
Your existing customers are 100% of your sales and 100% of any business’s profits. Spend time focusing on your customers rather than focusing on beating your competition. How can you redefine your customer’s experience? Rather than joining the rest of the herd and duplicating what your competition does, follow the advice of Ray Kroc and focus on your own strengths and make them unique and special. Now that would be “Magical”!