Getting More Customers vs. Keeping the Customers You Have

Last week Best Buy executive Mike Vitelli told an Oppenheimer Consumer Growth Conference about the chain’s plans to expand growth and increase revenues. One of their more interesting strategies will be to expand their musical instrument category beyond the basic keyboards and guitars that are available in their stores now. After visiting a Best Buy store this weekend, it wasn’t a clarinet or a drum set that I missed or wished for.

I was looking for some kind of liquid solution that would clean CD’s. It seemed to my low-tech logic that this product would be located where the CD bulk media was sold. A logical assumption maybe, but it was not correct. So I walked up to the first blue polo-shirted employee I spotted and asked him where I could find CD cleaner. His response was “I’m sure they probably have it somewhere, but I’m a vendor. You have to find an employee.” He pointed me in a general direction and walked away.

Blue polo shirt #2 directed me to blue polo shirt #3 at the opposite side of the store, who I followed like a puppy dog as he snaked his way up and down the aisles, in the same manner that I had done myself on the opposite site of the store. Blue polo #3 asked blue polo #4, who pointed me to the corner before they both walked away together.

I didn’t find any CD cleaning solution shoved on the shelves in the corner next to the emergency exit door where I had been directed. Unwilling to seek out blue polo shirt #5, I walked out of the store empty-handed.

One of my long held beliefs is that most businesses don’t need to go out and get more customers, they just need to figure out how to keep the customers they already have. If Best Buy in particular, or the retail world in general asked its customers for strategies that would increase sales and drive growth, I wonder if the customers would suggest that they do something more, or just be better at what you do? If Mike Vitelli would have surveyed me while I was purchasing the cleaning solution from Wal-Mart just minutes later, I would have told him that he could have had my money if Best Buy had done better with the merchandise they have right now.

If your current customer service strategies allow the CD cleaner customer to walk out empty-handed, then what’s going to keep the trombone customer from walking out empty-handed too?