Now is The Time To Focus on Existing Customers More Than Ever

There are numerous instances of business niches in optometry. Depending on whatever niche is both the most lucrative and the most in-demand, your choice of a niche will vary depending on where you live. You don’t want to find yourself working for a market that has no customers. The majority of the doctors I know have created a specialty around an illness they have or one that runs in their family, such as keratoconus, specialty lenses, glaucoma, etc. Although it is well recognized that you must be knowledgeable and skilled in your niche, you don’t need to be an expert to launch, succeed in, and expand a niche. Additionally, you must be enthusiastic about the market you are targeting as long as it is profitable and brings enough customers.

The power of niche is becoming more and more understood, and entrepreneurs in optometry are realizing that the opportunity of a niche does not have to be the same as another optometrist niche. This is due to the growing demand in specialization and niche due to more practitioners leaving primary eye care behind. Those who have already been working in niche understand that they meet all three requirements before they choose a specialty: What they are passionate about, who do they want to treat, and who is their ideal patient.

Once the ideal patient is figured out managers now have a clear understanding on the patients they are serving and want to keep. Similarly to many industries, getting a new customer in Optometry can cost five to twenty-five times more than keeping an existing one. It seems obvious that you only need to keep your current client satisfied rather than investing time and money in seeking new ones. If you’re still not sure that keeping clients is so valuable. A research by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the creator of the net promoter score) demonstrates that raising customer retention rates by 5% improves earnings by 25% to 95%.

You Mon Tsang, co-founder and CEO of ChurnZero, a company that assists businesses in managing their clientele, had the opportunity to observe how businesses that aggressively prioritized their current customers were able to navigate the Covid-19 pandemic with the least amount of interruption. Those companies focused on three practices: Knowing their customer cohorts and their health, Creating repeatable plays to stop churn, and Monitoring product usage with an eye toward long-term adoption.