Skipper's blog: Have you ever told your customers they're important?

I WAS recently talking to a mate who happened to mention that, due to the current trying economic times (and also due to the fact that straitened work circumstances and redundancy woes had befallen him and his wife respectively), he had decided to remove his bowrider from its drystack berth in a well-known and popular marina. He duly arrived with car and trailer to bring the boat back home, but first had to go to the marina office to tell them what was happening. The lady was very polite and businesslike, if a little clinical and blasé about his departure, as she provided a document for his signature to confirm that the boat was leaving permanently.

This is an absolutely top-flight marina, by the way – modern, clean and a paradigm of professionalism. An outstanding example of the genre, with polished, precision-drilled launching/recovery staff that always had the boat in the water at or before the requested time. In fact, even if my mate happened to arrive 15-20 minutes early, the boat would still be in the water, tied neatly to the dock and pointing bow-out ready to head directly for the waterways. No problems at all on the service or performance fronts, then, so why make an epistle out of it? Read on.

On the way into the office, my mate happened to see the marina owner’s 4WD (German, range-topping, expensive, personalised rego), and when he entered the office to sign for removal of the boat, there was merely the close-out process and nothing at all in the way of niceties or pleasantries. My mate also saw the owner’s well-fed and prosperous-looking son in an open office, less than five metres from where business was being conducted with the admin staff. Now, obviously my mate’s trailerboat wouldn’t have given the marina the revenue they would have amassed from, say, a 48ft Riviera on a wet berth, but he’d had it there for four years at over $3K per annum. And he was never as much as one second late with the payable-in-advance fees, even ringing from abroad on a mobile on one occasion with his credit card payment.

What irked him immensely, to the point that he’ll definitely use another facility once his circumstances improve, is that there was wasn’t a single word of gratitude, appreciation or thanks – from either the admin staff or the owner’s son - for the $12K plus he had put in these people’s coffers over the years. The last time this happened, he said, was when he removed a dry-stacked boat from a marina just north of Sydney that is actually owned by an investment bank, but he knew that expecting gratitude or appreciation from them was like seeking sympathy or compassion from the Khmer Rouge.  

Many years ago, you may have seen (and still do see in business premises that update their showroom decor about as often as a politician tells the truth) a poster proclaiming that a customer is not an encumbrance, an irritation or a distraction; that he/she is the sole reason for the existence of the business. Although such posters are now exceedingly hackneyed, trite and quaintly twee, time has certainly not dimmed their message. Anybody oblivious to what is happening to our industry needs to realise that customers – both long-standing and existing – are heading for the hills faster than a militant, extreme-Left feminist who has inadvertently blundered into at a Tony Abbott benefit function. In short, we are going to have to make a lot less go a lot further.

Someone else I know was going to upgrade his boat but instead sold his existing one and elected to fly himself, his wife and two teenagers Business Class to Europe for one of those “time-out” adventures they’d agonised over for years. So there’s over twenty grand in airfares alone that won’t be going to a marine dealer anytime soon. I asked him why, and made the point that all that’s left from a holiday are memories, photos and jerky home-made DVDs. He agreed totally but said that he was just suffering from complete ennui, apathy and disinterest in boating in general, and reckoned that the $400+ gouged annually for boat and trailer registration and annual trailer roadworthy fees (he’s in NSW) was “dead” money that he just didn’t want to part with anymore. And then there was the cashed-up neighbour who was torn between a new Yank gin palace, a used Riviera or a full-spec Maui motorhome – guess what route he took.

I have never been more serious when I say that the marine industry – every single segment of it – is under threat as never before. Dealers are going under; banks and finance institutions are callously and remorselessly bailing the minute floor traffic slows; marinas and refit facilities are going into receivership, and opportunistic, short-term, “fair weather” outsiders are pumping predatorily-priced imported American tat into a market that has contracted almost as fast as the British car industry. If any of you keep and regularly update a ‘live” customer database, I’d virtually guarantee that you haven’t seen over 75% of the people on that register for over a year – even for a bottle of oil or a drain bung.

Whilst it can never be reliably quantified and is undoubtedly one of the great “unknown unknowns”, there is no doubt that customers are deserting in droves and it is my opinion that we will never get many of them back. We need to be smarter, more innovative, more professional, more welcoming and more possessive – by “possessive” I mean taking pride of ownership in those customers who are faithful, loyal old-timers that always pop into your dealership to buy something, no matter how small. Now, more than ever, we cannot afford to be casual and cavalier about customers. Of course, one needn’t be like Basil Fawlty sickeningly grovelling before Lord Melbury (before the lord was exposed as a conman); nor should one ever be a pushover and overly sycophantic or cloyingly subservient with customers, but I reckon it’s time we took them seriously rather than for granted.