Editorial

The pop song Shop Around, by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, was about looking for a love partner, but today’s consumer may be using the phrase as a mantra when shopping for eyewear.
Optician Kim McEachern says approximately 80 percent of her clients at Vancouver’s See and Save Optical Boutique shop around — and this is a store with a 30-year history and plenty of repeat customers. But Kim and her colleagues must be doing something right because half of the folks who come in to browse do eventually buy the mid-to-high end frames.
This issue has two feature stories about helping you attract and keep customers. The first is about harnessing customer intelligence and the second covers Internet marketing, with a focus on drawing customers into your store. There’s a lot more to marketing today than having a great location and attractive window display.
Joan Pajunen, co-author of The Butterfly Customer, a book on creating customer loyalty says, “The fact that so many consumers do pre-shopping research on the Internet can assure you that they have some information about you and your products. Your job is to understand what motivates them, what benefits they are seeking and how much (or how little) they need from you. Gaining customer loyalty is a fleeting goal these days and it takes building a relationship to get in the loyalty game.  Seeing customers as intelligent and treating them as such is a great way to begin.”
Harnessing customer intelligence can mean conducting a formal survey and entering the findings into your customer relations management (CRM) software program, or informally gathering information about customer needs while serving them and jotting down notes later. In today’s impersonal world, a call, note or even the right kind of email from an optician who cares about your vision and your needs can make all the difference in the world.
In our first issue of the year, Vision Magazine welcomes a new columnist, Evra Taylor Levy, and her series ‘Living With…”, that explores the issues and challenges facing people living with various eye diseases. She begins the series with the inspiring story of Gabriel Couture, a young man living with retinitis pigmentosa.

Paddy Kamen