Customer Services: Part I: Who is Our Customer

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises; he is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider in our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so.”
Mahatma Gandhi

Now this is the first one which I want to share with you all. I have only two years of experience and in these two years luckily I was able to interact with two customers; first was a non Indian customer and the second one was an Indian customer. Also I have a very experienced staff around me so I can say that I have more than 30 years of customer experience. In retrospect, I feel dealing with non-Indian client was easier than that of with the Indian one. I am putting here my personal view on marketing based on my personal experience (including what I got from my highly experienced staff at Mumbai) till now.

This world is a market and two kind of people live here: 1) Seller and 2) Buyer. The first one is salesperson and the second one is Customer. We all come under these two categories. Most of us find ourselves as a customer but at the same time we are salesperson as well but we do not realize it. Let’s take a very simple example; ‘I remember an instance of my school when I was in class third, everyone was very much fond of other's lunch box and to get that they use all means of ways. In that scenario motive was “lunch box” and the customer was “classmate”. Also when one found a very rich customer (in terms good food), he/she tried to retain that so that he/she can enjoy the delicious food for a long turn.’ There are so many if you can think how many times you acted as a customer and as a salesperson. Now think about the above for a while how focused was one to achieve ones goal. If we relate it with the current market scenario than the “lunch box” is “money” and “classmate” is “customer”. There are two things I have noticed very important:
1) Making new customer
2) Retention of customer

Both are very difficult in current market situation but in my views the second one is the most important aspect of customer services for any organization. Also it requires a lot of research and analysis. Most of the successful organizations focus on that part only.

When we go to market to sell our product/services, two things we keep in mind 1) our motive (to make money) 2) Attract customer. But we always do mistake by forgetting the fact that money comes from customer and at the end of the day we finish with praising our product/services and forget the customer. We start working on our services/product without proper investigation and research on customer. We don’t know who is our target customer and we only focus on our services.

There are lots of things to share on this but I want to have some inputs from your experience. Please tell me “Who is our Customer?”

Please give your valuable suggestions and feedback on this. All kinds of comments are welcome.