This 300-year-old coin around my neck. It was off of a Spanish Shipwreck known as the Shipwreck of 1715. When I first saw it, I noticed a little hole with a speck of a diamond. I questioned the jeweler about it, why would you drill a hole in a 300-year-old coin and damage this 300-year-old treasure? The jeweler preceded to tell me that it was a 300-year-old hole.
Think about how we used currency 300 years ago. There were no banks, no financial institutions to hold merchants money. So if I had a bunch of money, I had it on a wire or had it in a box. I may have kept my money in my mattress. People would keep their money on a wire, punch holes in the coins, string the money through the wire and then go back to business on their horse and buggy, or however they got from point-to-point 300 years ago. If you have ever heard a phrase that the business owner started his business on a shoe string, you now know where the phrase originated.
What I found amazing in this one coin that I wear is that, It has thousands of transactions in its history. Who knows what was bought and sold with this very coin? Whether it was goats or chickens, a piece of property somewhere, or a boat ride to the states, or whatever it might be. There is no documented history behind each one of those transactions.
Today, when National Transaction processes a transaction for a merchant, we know the date and time. We know the amount of sale, we probably know the email address and the owner zip code, we actually know quite about the information around that transaction.
Many articles are written that answer the who, what, when, where and why questions with today’s electronic transactions. We have four of the five answers. We know who, what, when and where. The only thing that we don’t know is why the customer bought the item.
If this coin had today’s technologies there would have been thousands of transactions that this coin could have shared. The story of those purchases would be fascinating.
All business owners wants to make a sale. Each time they do make a sale, we recommend capturing any and all contact information. This customer is a buyer! Today, most people have an email address or cell phone number. If we don’t capture the customer’s information we have just ignored the single most important thing in any business’s life cycle: the customer.
