Not your Net Promoter score but a number that is equally as important in helping to determine profitability when providing an extraordinary customer experience. The lifetime customer value is what I’m asking for.

A huge component in building a lifetime relationship with a customer is to find a way to establish enough trust so that he or she feels that we’re not just there to soak them out of every dollar we can. If you can shift your thinking away from merely selling and into building some trust instead, even if it costs you a few bucks in profit, you’ll begin to see opportunities you never imagined. It starts when you understand what it means to “wow” that customer by giving him or her more than expected. When we started adjusting our thinking about our customers so that we began to consider the lifetime value of their business –our number is $12,500, which will deliver $5250 profit to our company – we could shift our thinking to what we were willing to spend to turn all those one-time purchases into lifetime customers. Any business that isn’t thinking along these lines is simply playing in the wrong game.

Granted, it’s not always easy to think this way. It’s only human nature to push back from time to time when you feel like a customer is asking for too much. That’s why we’re constantly reinforcing the notion that we need to think about the lifetime value of our customers to help put the little things in perspective.

I remember a recent case where a man, a doctor in fact, came into the store to return a bike tube. It clearly had a hole created by a screwdriver in it –he must have slipped and accidentally punctured the new tube when he was changing his tube. Rather than own up to it, our customer insisted that we had sold him a defective tube. I watched as my employee who was waiting on the customer began to get a bit riled up. “Sir, there’s no possible way we sold you this part in this condition,” he said. Although I couldn’t have agreed more, I walked over to the shelf and grabbed a new tube. I then handed it to the customer and thanked him for bringing the defective tube to our attention. The doc kind of looked at me strangely, I could see him visibly relax. He even smiled–not the smile of a huckster but a smile that said, “Wow, thanks.”

After the doctor left, my employee came up to me to ask why I had given in to a customer who was clearly trying to take advantage of us. I said. “That guy could come back in here tomorrow and buy a $2,000 bike from us and throughout his lifetime he will spend $12500, so when you look at it like that, a six-dollar tube is not even worth a conversation.” That tube serves as a small but critical lesson that all my employees embrace. We should always be prepared to satisfy the customer so we are confident we can secure that customer for life.

Tropicana, one of our partners on the commercial side of our business, told me that the lifetime value of one of their customers is $32,500. They arrived at that figure by estimating that the average customer will buy somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand cartons of their juice over time. No wonder the company’s marketing efforts are focused on children, right? Additionally, the lifetime customer value to the owner of your neighborhood pizza joint is $25,000. That’s a lot of pizza –and once that owner starts thinking about his or her customers as having more value than the $20 pepperoni special they just ordered, the more successful the owner can be.

Saying that you want to create a lifetime relationship with your customers is one thing; it’s quite another to make it happen. To be successful at building these kinds of relationships often requires you to think differently about why your customer needs you in the first place. In this virtual age, where so many transactions happen with no human being involved, finding a way to make emotional connections with your customers is key.

I realized that this principle applies even to buying bikes: anyone can go online and shop for a bike. You can even get a lot of great advice about what kind of bike and parts you need if you keep up with the industry blogs and online user discussion forums. If you looked at all the odds stacked against you as a retail bike shop, why would you have any confidence whatsoever that anyone would actually make the effort of stopping by our store to buy a bike. The answer, we came to realize, was because we would be there when one of our customers’ children’s bikes breaks or, to move up the food chain, when the parent of a child who rides one of our bikes needs to find a replacement part in a pinch. In other words, we want our customers to come in and buy from us because we will take care of their needs far better than any retailer who thinks of them simply as an e-mailed order number.

Our goal is to show our customers that we want each of them to feel as if they can always rely on us, especially after they’ve left our store with their new bikes. We also want to emphasize that when they do come back to us for help, we see those visits as opportunities to further our relationship with them, not just additional chances to ring up another dollar on the cash register.

Since we know, each and every customer is statically worth that magical $12500, focusing the lifetime value rather than on the transactional profit by providing an exceptional experience will guarantee our success and provide the opportunity to collect the 100% of our customers lifetime value.

So I ask you again, what’s your number?

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