Loyal Customers

Why should you never take a loyal customer for granted? This topic takes on two different meanings. The first aspect is business. Whether you’re a business owner, a high-level executive who deals with customers or someone working in the customer-service industry, you deal with customers on a daily basis. The second facet of this topic is dating your spouse. Treating your spouse as a customer and working to retain and cultivate that relationship will help you continually grow in your marriage. 

All of us have customers — whether they’re buying goods from you or you’re servicing them, regardless of the situation, everyone has customers. We work really hard gaining customers. We put on a good show, we send them letters, we take care of them, we put our best foot forward. However, when we have those loyal customers, we have a tendency occasionally to not to put forth the same amount of effort. We sometimes take them for granted, because a particular individual may have been a loyal customer of yours for several years, because he or she is always going to be there. Still, that’s not always the case. We have to take care of the customers we do have; the customers who are paying our bills, the customers who we have grown to rely on to make our business grow. We should continue to put forth the same amount of effort on the backend as we did on the front end, because those customers could very easily go somewhere else, and we cannot let that happen. It’s been said thousands of times — it’s so much easier to get more money out of an old customer than it is to gain a new customer. Let’s cultivate those relationships with our existing and loyal customers.

The second prong of this theory deals with dating our spouse. When I was dating my wife, Jackie, I tried extremely hard to gain her as a customer. I put forth a significant amount of effort. For example, I called her, I wrote her letters, I dressed up when I saw her. I performed all of these acts in order to gain her as a customer, to gain her as mine. As time has progressed, we have a tendency to take that customer, the most important customer in our lives, for granted. Whether it’s your husband or your wife, don’t take them for granted. Date them like you once dated them. When I was in college, and I dated Jackie, I would work my whole day around seeing her and being with her. I would spend hours on end being with her, and to be honest, I have now taken that for granted. She is the most important person in my life. She is more important than my kids, and so I’ve got work to not take her for granted. I’ve got to create time for her. I’ve got to send her notes, and do the things that make her feel loved, because she is the most important thing. It’s like a loyal customer you want to gain, get revenue and keep your business afloat. We need to do the same for our spouse. So many times in life we take our spouses for granted for various reasons. Let me give you a piece of advice — don’t take them for granted. They’re going to be with you a lot longer than those customers will be. If you can continue to cultivate that relationship with the person who you sleep next to, it will pay dividends so many times down the road. What’s an actionable task? Go home today, and don’t take your spouse for granted. Do something out of the ordinary. Do something you used to do when you dated them that you don’t do any more.