Successful convenience store leaders invest time and resources in building meaningful relationships with customers, communities and staff members for many reasons: brand equity, shareholder value, attracting new customers.  The most fundamental reasons are profits and reduced costs!  But what about our customers? Today’s shopper desires a true relationship with you, the retailers. And if you’re successful, these consumers will reward you with their loyalty and their dollars.

Making External Connections
It takes 5 times as many resources to win a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.  So why isn’t more attention paid to retaining and engaging your current customers and clients?  In our increasingly detached world, where people spend more time staring at little screens in their hands than interacting with actual people, what creates real customer relationships is quite simple: understanding your shoppers’ needs.  Knowing their needs means continually working to meet their changing tastes and delivering a personalized experience.  Is your marketing department creating programs aligned with your customers’ needs and communicating them effectively?

Making Internal Connections
Internal relationship-building is as important as building strong external relationships.  A significant cost for every business lies in recruiting, hiring and training new employees.  Happy employees deliver better customer service, which in turn yields improved customer relationships and increased sales and profits.  So why are companies hesitant to financially and emotionally invest in holding onto good employees and their worthy brand stewards?  Is your operations team consciously making personal connections with employees and taking steps to engage them long-term?

For the brick-and-mortar retailer to thrive in a highly competitive and online shopping world, it must learn to read shoppers’ behavior, stay abreast of current trends, effectively and consistently communicate its message from boardroom to front line with employees motivated to be customer-centric.  Only those operators willing to make a connection with its internal and external customers will capture the ultimate prize of sustained banner loyalty. 

With its thought-provoking speakers, sensational networking and educational platform all focused on addressing “what you need to know now,” CRU2013 is where you begin to make the right connections.