The business of business is getting and keeping good customers. Period. All else follows. -- Author unknown

Would it interest you to find a way to turn every dollar your company invested into two dollars and thirty-three cents?

In November 1998, ABC World News Tonight featured a three-part series titled "A Closer Look at Service in America". Here is what the research uncovered:

1. Service is not what it used to be.

2. Bad service equals bad advertising.

3. Good customer service equals satisfied customers.

4. Customer Satisfaction equals profits.

In fact, it was determined that every dollar spent by retailers on customer service typically returns $2.33. In the banking and hospitality industries, each dollar spent on customer service returns $1.44.

Ask yourself this: How many customers did business with you last year but not this year? Most businesses lose 15-20 percent of their customers each year. By simply retaining one half of these customers from one year to the next would double the average company's growth rate.

Besides business growth, it typically cost much less to keep a customer than to attract a new one. Companies spend considerable amounts of money in all areas of the business to generate new customers: Advertising, public relations, hiring, training and managing a sales force, administrative time to set up new customer accounts, operation time to understand new customers and everyone's time and energy to build a new relationship. That is a lot of time and money that could be reduced if a greater number of existing customers continued to spend more and more with your company.

Customer Satisfaction, the only sustainable competitive advantage

There will always be a new and improved product or a faster technology. To rely on either is to await disaster. Delighted customers become captive customers, those that are unwilling to do business with competitors for fear of losing the service and relationship they have established. Captive customers represent money in the bank for years to come.

Over the past couple of years I have done business with several Southwest Florida companies that stand out for their commitment to customer satisfaction. They all seem to look at their customer as a long-term investment and have built their business around them. Let's have a look at what a few of them have to say about the way they satisfy customers:

Sunshine Mortgage, Pampers Hi-Tech Cleaners are businesses that are five years old or less and operate in Lee or Collier counties. Although each company approaches customer satisfaction in different ways, each has experienced tremendous performance in customer satisfaction, retention and referrals. The result has been an average of 30 percent growth per year.

Dan and Heather Creighton, owners of Pampers Hi-Tech Cleaners, attribute much of the company's customer satisfaction success to their customer-centered employee performance measurement and accountability system. The employees who serve customers are monitored by the entire team for greeting the customer by name, courteously interacting with the customer and asking how Pampers Hi-Tech Cleaners can improve the next experience. Any slip, including not calling the customer by name, results in a .50 cent fine.

Since the quality of the cleaning service is critical, all back-end employees and processes are managed as well. As a dry cleaning order gets processed, it is handed off from one work area to another. Before each hand off, an employee signs off on the work he or she performed. If there are any oversights or mistakes discovered at the next process, it is brought to the attention of the employee at fault, and that employee must correct the mistake, then pay a 50 cent fine - on the spot! Dan and Heather assure me the money collected goes right back to the employees in the form of fun, team-building functions.

Jane Casarsa, President of Sunshine Mortgage, relies on rock-solid procedures and proper training of all employees. "As a mortgage broker, we often have to work with ten or more parties such as lenders, title companies, realtors, pest control companies and insurance companies, each with their own requirements and specific way of doing business. Our greatest challenge, and one we take pride in, is effectively taking ownership of the entire process and pulling all of these groups together in order to get the closing done on-time and to make the homebuyer's experience as comfortable and smooth as possible. Although we don't regard meeting closing deadlines as anything more than doing our job properly, it is unbelievable the horror stories we hear that are a results of a bank or another mortgage company not taking ownership and managing the entire process."

With satisfied customers come repeat customers and referrals. These companies have proven that. They are also the first ones to admit that they continue to look for new ways to delight their customers. It is a never-ending journey.

Rorie Wilson's firm, BPM International, is a Southwest Florida-based consulting firm that assists organizations in achieving performance excellence through Total Quality management and Customer Satisfaction systems.