Ted and Flori Pate, owners of Dig Local in Asheville, talk about ways to keep track of your customers, stay in touch with them, and retain them for a lifetime.
So when we started and we started bringing on members to Dig Local, the first 100 members was a lot easier because you could keep track of them, you could keep in touch with them, you could remember their names. Then all of a sudden it's 150, then all of a sudden it's 200, then there's 250. And we had a challenge of keeping up with customer care as we grew, we just didn't anticipate to grow that fast. And we had never provided that kind of customer care in any business we had been in. So we had to go back and create a position in our business for our customer care person. And we probably should have done that months earlier. We realized some of our mistakes, we realized that when we talked to some people, they're like, "I haven't talked to anybody from your company in six months and that's unacceptable." And we learned that lesson and now we really work hard. We have processes and procedures where we check in with our members every couple of months just to see how it's going and get feedback.
