The experience the customer has of getting and using your product or service should be unique, delightful, rewarding, and memorable. Your business is a theater, and the customer is the star of the show.

Quality matters. Things have to work. The entire company must be built around developing a relationship that is satisfying to the customer. Because more value will be there, the customer will be willing to pay a high price.

Baby boomers are withdrawing from their buying spree and all consumers of products and services have less time and patience. A strategy for dealing with this is going to the customer instead of getting them to come to you.

Successful Hudson Valley organizations will use technology and convenience as primary means of going to the customer. Lands’ End Web site allows you to try on different outfits in virtual reality or see a room decorated with different rugs or curtains. Shop-at-home services like the Home Shopping Network, and QVC are other examples.

Customers want to talk with people who know their business. Radio Shack, Home Depot, and PetsMart are examples of companies that have mastered product expertise. At PetsMart associates wear a button with a picture of a particular animal to indicate their area of “special expertise.”

Shell Oil built its expertise in auto maintenance and highway safety by publishing booklets filled with useful information on everything from improving gas mileage to how to avoid getting mugged.

Professions that specialize in a specific area continue to thrive. There are physicians, attorneys, engineers and accountants who demonstrate and market expertise in a single area and remember that the customer is always on “center stage.”

Organizations can pursue “status marketing” best understood by dropping a few names: Tiffany, Mercedes, Rolex, Porsche. The customer is rewarded for doing business by enjoying a certain feeling.

Hudson Valley retailers and service providers should link their organizations to an especially rewarding, valuable, enjoyable, or effective use of time. Get your customer in and out quickly. How about express check-out for preferred customers or a maximum five-minute wait for an office visit?

Bring the product to the customer. The variations are endless, buy at home, deliver to the home, a psychotherapist or hairstylist who makes house calls. ATM’s are an example of moving the store to the customer. Put it all under one roof. Kinko’s used to be a copy shop. Now it’s a one-stop-shopping destination for office needs from computer rental to supplies to FedEx.

What about having “joint custody customers?” Your company takes the lead role in deciding what the customer wants and how to get it to them. Sun, IBM, and other companies have gotten together to provide corporate clients with complete hardware, software, consulting, accounting, financial, and database needs. Even though there are many vendors involved, the process is seamless to the customer.

Selling of complete solutions will migrate from business-to-business transactions to individual customer transactions as well. What does your customer experience when doing business with you now? Make your organization a theater with your customer the star of your show for maximum success in the future.

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