When conducting cold calling for tax consulting leads, companies must bear in mind the characteristics that will be able to give their business leverage on the demand or customer. This falls under the equation of customer captivity. The scope of its advantage will depend on how much your business ties your target consumers to the product or service. Customer captivity has three sources, these are: habit, switching costs, and search costs.
Habit. This is a better way of saying addiction but basically this is what it’s about.
Just like an addict who keeps coming back for the same brand of alcohol or cigarettes despite fierce enticing tactics from competitors using quality or price, you as the owner of the brand are well aware that the best way to keep him coming back for more and ignoring other alternatives is to push for high frequency with consistency. This is something that needs to be worked on and reinforced over time. With regular use, buying becomes automatic and the habit becomes deeply ingrained.
Switching costs. The downside for customers switching costs are the direct costs that will be incurred once the relationship has ended. For instance, a lot of information businesses integrate software elements as part of their offerings. They claim to be “business solutions” and not just your ordinary data providers, so they can increase the switching costs of customers. Similarly, once a gamer has already perfected his techniques on a particular software game, he will think twice before switching to another one.
Search costs. The problem of consumers in high search cost businesses do not lie in giving up the old relationship the way you do when switching costs, rather, it’s in finding better ones to take its place. This can be very expensive especially in situations where quality is of the highest importance where the smallest service variations can have major implications. Both switching and search costs cases share the same scenario: the more complex the product or service is, the greater the competitive advantage will be. This is the reason why companies competing for similar markets are devoted to finding ways to integrating better elements into their offering. As long as you keep the customers happy, you’ll always have them captive because there’s no reason for them to drop you like a hot potato.