There is no point in focusing your time and efforts on a segment of your customers that fit the “bad customer” profile. Whether you like it or not, there are always bound to be customers that do not fit your company and your brand. Such customers end up wasting your time, your marketing efforts, and your customer service.
This can be described by the famous 80/20 rule where 80% of your business issues and problems and customer service headaches are a result of 20% of your customers. If you can identify who this 20% is and fire them, your business would improve dramatically.
In this video, I take a brief look at this issue and suggest a few ways of handling this situation. I am surprised that most businesses do not realize this. In our own business here on Logo Design Works, I did a similar audit and realized that customers of a particular service made up 75% of our customer service calls and email correspondence. This was the brochure design service. I then analyzed the revenue model and realized that the actual revenue from brochure design projects was less than 11% of our total sales.
Because brochure designs are for marketing purposes and clients do not really have a good marketing strategy before they approach us, the designs we create almost always felt short of their expectations. Perhaps these clients have been exposed to brochures created by large companies, who spend thousands of dollars on creating their marketing material and set their expectations high. But they want this service for less than $400 and still get the same results. On top of that printing issues and coordination between their printer and our designers took up a huge chunk of time.
So I made the conscious decision to discontinue offering Brochure Design services. When we get calls related to brochure design orders, we politely turn them down. This has improved our customer service record quite dramatically!
