Customer is God to our business

I am an Affiliate in SFI, that makes me a customer for SFI (both internal and external) and if you look in depth, my team members by default are also my customers as much as they are SFI's! This brings me to a more basic principle of sales and marketing - retain your best customers.

This is not as easy as it sounds because retaining your best customers requires a lot of commitment to your customers, loyalty and keeping in mind that it's more difficult to retain a customer than it is to get one.

I bring this topic up this morning because my ones raked STL both PSA and CSA both opting -out and this got me thinking how easy it was for SFI to lose a "customer" yet it is in our control who we keep as our "customers" and who we would rather let go. 

In my opinion it is even more catastrophic to lose a team leader but with the SFI business, the internal customers do not suffer much because the team gets passed over. Having said that, losing affiliates is much easier than having a system in place that acknowledges the contributions of the "customers" and ensuring that they do not leave. 

We need to retain our best affiliates and how this is done will depend on the relationship between the affiliates and SFI (whether this includes the Moderators, the Management or Support - these are three areas that come to mind where affiliates associate them to in the course of their day to day business)

In the general world of customers, we lose them because:
- they are unhappy with our service
- they feel their needs are not met
- the service does not expose a culture of high professional standards
- there is an attitude of "we don't need you"
- there is little focus on relationship building and more attention towards monetary gain
  from the "customer"

I'd like to say that people do have a choice of "opting-out" and agreed, that there is no compulsion to stay on if you do not wish to but what about a team leader who has committed to over 5 years of team building? He/she is here to stay. 
This is what I mean when I say, "retain your best customers" and it is important every now and then to remind ourselves that every auto-delivery, every sale on TripleClicks that goes in every month gives me reason to believe that these valued "customers" are the backbone of the organisation and whatever way we can to retain them, keep them happy will be a win-win for both SFI and the "customer".

 it is important to not only retain other affiliates but external customers. In many instances, the affiliates are new and don't want to do the basics but still wants to get paid. We retain external customers by providing good customer service and good product management.

Retaining "best and valued customers" especially if these customers are also SFI Affiliates and team leaders to boot. 

At this moment, I am mourning the loss of my team leader.

Suffice it to say that this really leaves an unpleasant taste for us as what you said "there is an attitude of 'we don't need you'" rings a bit of truth. so take care and do not allow to build such unpleasant test among your teams.