Well, personally or professionally? With our private life, the answers might range from parents to children, from siblings to grandparents, from spouses to fiancées, from human beings to pets.
Professionally, we may conclude that a person with the preeminent influence is our boss, a former teacher, a more experienced colleague or a business personality we’d like to resemble. Anyway, it’s vital to know who or/and what we treasure, as our best attitude naturally is attributed to things we value.
Therefore, if we work with clients, isn’t it only natural to wonder in our reflective moments: Who is MY most important customer? Frankly and instinctively, most of us would identify them as the rich and influential. After all, isn’t it wise to service VIPs whose payments easily exceed those of ‘mortals’?
Not surprising, it has become a mark of prestige to provide and promote specially and exquisitely moulded VIP-services for high-earners and high-spenders. Various service providers have commenced hunting for moneyed clients, ostensibly realizing their colossal paying potential. However, aren’t we misreading the situation, staking exclusively on this exclusive clientele?
I remember talking to an IT specialist about the safety of Internet transactions. “I guess you shouldn’t worry much when sharing your credit card details online if you are not a titan of finance. Cyber rogues won’t bother to target you, will they?” As I found out a split second later, that naively short-sighted statement of mine was anything but right. My communicator unveiled an eye-opening and jaw-dropping truth.
As it appears to be, hackers opt for stealing a lot of small sums from the general public rather than a few large sums from the high and lofty…
It has never been my intention to draw a parallel between illegal activities and legally rendered services. However, doesn’t it occur to us that prioritising the VIP segment at other segments’ expense is likely to be a faulty strategy?
VIPs are normally more solvent. Yet they are more susceptible to some internally hostile factors. The not so recent crisis has eloquently shown that those were high end restaurateurs who suffered most when their rich clients’ revenues dried up.
Quite on the contrary, restaurants targeting middle income customers generally managed to remain confidently in the black.
What’s more, VIPs, naturally wishing to retain an air of exclusivity, might be more reluctant when recommending your company’s services to others. In contrast, ordinary customers are usually intrinsically happy to spread the word about a service provider they liked among their relatives, friends and colleagues.
Intriguingly, you never know who your most ardent supporter and promoter will become. Sometimes a least imposingly looking client starts a most amazingly long chain of referrals which you could never guess when first talking to them.
What am I driving at? Well, we simply don’t know who, in the long run, will be our most useful client. It means that attempts to identify our most important client are largely thankless, if not pointless. Is it disheartening? Not in the slightest! As it only teaches us to treat every single client of ours as the one and only VIP on the globe and consequently give them the highest level of customer service possible. It’s so simple, relieving and beautiful!
Remember a New Testament principle? We are to do good to our neighbour, who, at the end of the day, is anybody and everybody we encounter. So, who is our most important client? The one we are servicing at the moment. A business that has grasped this is bound to flower.
