I had a bad experience with a bank recently. This is an institution that markets itself as a place where customers are treated differently than at other lending institutions. Inside this bank, you are given a warm cup of coffee, a place to browse the internet and comfy chairs to rest in while you wait your turn. All of this is very nice, but this bank just lost my business forever.

I would like you to envision a stool like the one pictured to the left. You will notice that it has three legs. Ask any engineer and they will tell you that you need a minimum of three legs for a stool like this to hold any weight without toppling over. Now I want you to imagine that the weight carried on that stool is the retention of your customers. There are three legs (and sometimes four) that make a customer want to do business with you again.

The first leg is a great price. Customers want to feel as if they have received a deal. If you are competitively priced, you stand a good chance of retaining your customers. If you are overpriced and your customers find out about it, forget about getting them back. A big mistake many businesses make is assuming that price is the only reason your customers are coming back to you. I can assure you that they are not. If price is the only leg on your stool, you are simply doing a balancing act until your competition comes along and undercuts you. It is a matter of time before you fall down.

The second leg is quality. No one likes to purchase junk. If you are peddling rubbish, you might snooker someone into purchasing from you once, but you will never get them back again. There is a reason why snake oil salesmen were traveling salesmen; they got out of town before an angry mob of hoodwinked customers caught up with them. If you have a great product, you stand a good chance of getting repeat business from your customers. You can get away from being the low bidder if you have quality. But don’t make the mistake that quality is all there is. It is not. You still need a competitive price. In fact, you will be shopped. In the days we live in, getting a competitive price is as easy as doing a quick search on the internet. I can price just about anything I need in a matter of minutes. So you must be competitive in your pricing if you want to retain clients. You also need the third leg.

The third leg is customer service. In other words, did you take care of the individual that purchased from you? Is there a relationship of trust that was established between them and you? Has this ever happened to you? You get a good price and a quality product, but the customer service leaves something to be desired. How many clients have been turned off by a bad experience with customer service? It is hard work to gain a client’s dollar. It takes great effort to produce with quality. It can all be for naught if you don’t treat the customer with the respect they are expecting from you.

The fourth leg I referred to earlier is timeliness. Some products and services are immediate in their delivery, so this may or may not relate to you (and many companies lump timeliness into customer service.) Timeliness is all about managing client expectations. If a car salesman tells a buyer that they can expect their new car to be delivered in two weeks, the car better be there when he said. If it is one day late, you will have a dissatisfied customer. However if the salesman would have said it would be at the dealership in 15 days, he has set the expectations differently. If you are on time or ahead of time in delivery of your product or service, congratulations, you have made strides in retaining your clients.