This is necessary before, during and after a sale. The type of information will depend on the product. For the customer to get a full understanding of the product they want to buy will depend on the product knowledge and training of the staff. Customer relations Good communication between the customer and the staff could prove to be the difference between gaining a customer and loosing a customer. Staff giving the customer a smile as they enter through the door, or a greeting or positive attitude are all aspects of good customer service.
When the customer meets a member of staff they are effectively meeting the whole organisation.
Delivery
This is an important feature of many marketing programmes and can ultimately be the deciding factor in the buying decision. Some people only buy certain fast foods because they provide free delivery with their service. Delivery nowadays is seen as an essential aspect in the market. Many popular companies start buy achieving individual customer satisfaction, this van be done with delivery. The provision of Customer Services The service for the customer mainly comes from the front line, or personnel.
This can occur before or after the sale of a company item, it is essential for the business to ensure that its customer services policy is designed to:
Age: – Barclays Bank provides a service to people of different ages. Barclays aims specific services directly at specific customers. This contributes to meeting the needs of certain customers.
Income: – Income is the amount of money a person earns. Depending on what service Barclays is providing will depend on what income group, they will aim at. For example, Barclays will offer certain accounts to certain customers depending on their income levels and savings.
Area: – When Barclays is deciding where to set up, they must remember; location, location, location. If someone wanted to set up a chip shop, they would be more successful if they set up in a place where people want and like chips. For example, if a person was to set up next to a football ground, they would be very successful, in that after each match people would be hungry and want fast food and would turn to the chip shop. For Barclays the locations best for them are in shopping centres and on busy high streets. The above is just a brief analysis of the different types of customers that Barclays have.
These different customers have different characteristics, which then bring forth different customer needs. Some of Barclays’ customer’s characteristics include certain disabilities/hindrances that can cause problems to Barclays if their customer services are not up to scratch. Disabilities that can appear in Barclay’s customers are as follows: These types of customers require special customer needs, and Barclays provides this for them. Some of the above customers as mentioned in theory, need help as soon as they come in, Barclays counters this with their customer services, by having someone at the entrance of the bank.
This person’s job is to greet customers as they come in and find out if they have any problems need any help and what in particular they have come into the bank for. For instance in the case of the foreign visitors, the greeter would need to help find out what service they have actually come into the bank for. If the foreigner couldn’t speak one word of English then the greeter would call a more experienced and well-trained employee to help them. This other person would help the foreigner as much as they possibly could.
Barclays just like many other businesses in their market like to do their job with smiles and right attitudes.
i. Some business objectives are just to maximise profit, therefore they take on pricing and production strategies that specifically aim to achieve this goal. It has been suggested that some businesses have restricted their production, in order for the prices to go up. With most businesses today, the more risks they take the more chances there are of getting high sales revenue; this is why a lot of businesses take a lot of risks.
ii. In some cases, some organisations just want to survive in their market and not get broken down by established, household name products or services. It has been said that survival is every businesses objective, especially in survival. Businesses that have survival as an objective are normally new businesses that just arrived in the specified market. Businesses that have survival as their objective tend not to take any risks in their first years and so their profit margin is low.
iii. Whether a business is selling a good or providing a service, sales revenue and sales volume are both relevant.
For example, a business such as library, wouldn’t measure its success according to sales revenue, but to the number of people that use its services. Whereas most other businesses measure their success according to profit.
iv. Market share is similar to business desire to achieve sales revenue and volume. Market share is defined as; the fragment or aspect of the market businesses control. Most of the time the more market share a business has the more power or control it has. If a business abuses or manipulates the part of the market it controls, the Competition Commission steps in.
An example of this is Microsoft, who have been abusing their market share and the competition Commission have stepped into the picture and forced them to separate into two different businesses. The above objectives are known as Quantitative Objectives. These types of objective are targets, which can be aimed for, with a numerical value. Other objectives are known as Qualitative Objectives. These types of objectives are non-profit making businesses, and their aims are to provide either a good or service to the public and if any money is made it goes back to the community.
