BUSI 4004 Week 11 Customer Relationship Plan Example

A Year-Long Plan for Keeping Grand River Cleaners' Regulars: How They Are Recognized, What They Hear and When, What Is Recorded and Who Sees It, Free Repairs as the Reason to Return and What Happens When Something Goes Wrong, Judged by One Measure

Student Name

Walden University

BUSI 4004: Customer Relationship Management for Small Business

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

A Year-Long Plan for Keeping Grand River Cleaners' Regulars: How They Are Recognized, What They Hear and When, What Is Recorded and Who Sees It, Free Repairs as the Reason to Return and What Happens When Something Goes Wrong, Judged by One Measure

The Measure

The plan for Grand River Cleaners, a composite shop, will be judged by one number: the share of its regular customers who are still active twelve months later. Regulars are customers with twenty or more orders a year, and a regular counts as active if an order has come in within sixty days. For regulars who first came in during 2025, the figure was 79 percent at two years. The target for 2028 is 85 percent of the shop's roughly 600 regulars still active on December 31. Reichheld and Sasser (1990) argued that keeping customers is among the most powerful drivers of profit in service businesses, and for a shop where a weekly regular brings in $1,500 to $3,600 a year, six more percentage points is worth tens of thousands of dollars.

How Regulars Are Recognized

The new customer record system, introduced in January, stores each regular's finish and packaging preferences in fixed fields and prints them on every garment tag, so pressers see them as well as clerks. When a regular gives a phone number at the counter, the screen shows their preferences, any open repair and any recent problem. A clerk's first words should reflect what the record shows: "Light starch, on hangers, as usual?" The opening discussion of this course described a customer who stayed three years because the shop remembered such details; the plan makes that memory belong to the system rather than to one clerk.

What Regulars Hear and When

Customers hear from the shop at four points. A ready text goes out when the order is scanned into its bag, not when the ticket is marked, which removes the most common complaint in the reviews. A reminder text follows after seven days if the order has not been picked up. A stain tag explains any stain the shop could not remove, and a call precedes any treatment that carries risk or cost. And customers who agreed to promotional email receive no more than one message a month, with an easy unsubscribe link, under the data practice rules adopted in October.

What Is Recorded and Who Sees It

The shop keeps only what it uses: contact details for texts and receipts, addresses for delivery customers, order history for three years, preferences while the customer is active, and stain and damage notes with photos for a year. Card details are held only by the payment processor. Clerks see contact details and order history; pressers see only tags; the owner handles requests to see or delete records. Martin and Murphy (2017) found that customers' trust depends partly on how firms handle their information, which is why these rules are part of a relationship plan rather than a separate compliance document.

The Reason to Return

Every registered customer receives free minor repairs on every order: buttons replaced, small seams closed and hems up to four inches resewn. A tag tells the customer what was done. The offer costs about $7,100 a year, about a third of what a tenth-shirt-free punch card would give up in revenue, and it rewards care rather than volume, which the feedback read found customers already value most. Dowling and Uncles (1997) argued that loyalty programs that competitors can easily copy soon lose their effect; free repairs require sewing skill the nearby chain cleaners do not have.

Spotting Regulars at Risk

Clustered failures, two or more within three months, sharply raised the odds of losing a regular in the retention analysis, and that one lost weekly customer's orders shrank for a month before he stopped. Two rules follow. Each Monday, the system's lapsed-regular report names every regular with three skipped Mondays in a row, or with orders down by half; the owner calls each one that week. And any regular with two recorded failures in three months gets a phone call from the owner herself, in addition to any counter credit.

When Something Goes Wrong

The service recovery plan sets out who responds, what clerks may offer without approval, up to $75 or a free re-treatment, how the customer hears back within one business day and how fairness is checked in a monthly review. Tax et al. (1998) found that customers judge recovery by its outcome, process and treatment, and the plan addresses each.

The Year at a Glance

Table 1

The Relationship Plan by Quarter, 2028

Grand River Cleaners and its targets are composite.

Who Owns the Plan

The owner owns the plan and the measure, makes the lapsed-regular calls and handles serious recovery cases. The senior clerk owns the system's texts and compares them with bagged orders every Friday. The lead presser owns silk and repair work. Payne and Frow (2005) place relationship management across every function of a firm, and in a shop of seven people that means naming who does each part.

Limits

The plan's measure counts whether regulars stay, not why. Some will leave for reasons the shop cannot affect, such as moving or changing jobs. The 85 percent target is a judgment based on one cohort's history. And the plan depends on the clerks scanning every bag and the owner making every call; if either slips, the measure will show it within a few months.

References

Dowling, G. R., & Uncles, M. (1997). Do customer loyalty programs really work? Sloan Management Review, 38(4), 71-82.

Martin, K. D., & Murphy, P. E. (2017). The role of data privacy in marketing. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 45(2), 135-155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-016-0495-4

Payne, A., & Frow, P. (2005). A strategic framework for customer relationship management. Journal of Marketing, 69(4), 167-176. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.2005.69.4.167

Reichheld, F. F., & Sasser, W. E., Jr. (1990). Zero defections: Quality comes to services. Harvard Business Review, 68(5), 105-111.

Tax, S. S., Brown, S. W., & Chandrashekaran, M. (1998). Customer evaluations of service complaint experiences: Implications for relationship marketing. Journal of Marketing, 62(2), 60-76. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299806200205