A customer is a customer – they are all the same aren’t they? Wrong! They are all different but some of them might have things in common and that is useful for a business to know.
Knowing your Customers – Who are the Customers?
Customers for a business are anyone who is willing to pay a price to acquire a good or service from a business. You might recognise customers as people milling around the supermarket but you might not think about them in the same way that a business might.
Some customers have many different wants and needs – some simple and some very complex. For example, when you go into a McDonald’s what your needs are tends to fairly straight forward – you want your food quickly, of reasonable quality and cheap.
A chemical company might have a customer that requires highly volatile chemical substances. They might want particular delivery dates, specific times of delivery, specific types of packaging, detailed advice and instruction manuals for use and care of the chemicals and the products made to very high quality specifications!
Get hold of a Yellow Pages or a Thomson’s Local Directory for your area. Identify 20 different businesses and then write down what type of customers these businesses might have.