Perspectives
In customer perspectives this season we
feature an article sourced from
www.psychotactics.com/
Do you have customers that leave suddenly? You were doing an outstanding job
for them, lavishing them with truckloads of
service and yet they disappeared without a
word.
The key operating factor here is 'without a
word.' That's the scary part! The silent ones
are always the most dangerous. If you
would like to learn how to keep your customers, you've first got to keep them noisy.
Read this marketing article to find out just
how you can make complaining clients
one of your biggest assets.
Imagine you run a pizza parlour. You have
all these neighbourhood families that pop in
at least once a week for some pizza, garlic
bread and Coke. On an average, one customer spends about $30 per week. But let's
assume they spend just $20. Imagine you
did something that bugged this customer,
but he or she never told you about it. What
would you stand to lose if they left?
Its simple math: You lose $20 x 50 weeks.
That's equivalent to $1000 a year. If you
lost just 10 such customers per month,
you'd lose about 100 clients a year. That's
$100,000 that could be in your back pocket
if you were a little complaint-conscious.
That Doesn't Happen in Our Business:
The Denial Syndrome
Overtly it won't. In a Bain & Company survey of major corporations, they found that
on average, U.S. Corporations lose half
their customers in five years. Notice, it wasn't 'one year' or 'suddenly'. Clients have a
tipping point. They get unhappy bit by bit
and then its camel-back-breaking time. So,
if you think that all your customers are
happy with you-they aren't. It's a basic fact
of life.
What's really weird is that you can't measure how much business you're really losing.
A study was done on a bank, they found
they had as many accounts as they had a
year ago. What they failed to measure was
how most of the people had 'silently' transferred the money out into other banks and
the closure of the account was a last measure, somewhere down the line.
The same thing applies to your customer.
Like a patient Buddha, they will seemingly
appear to put up with everything, till suddenly you find they don't use you anymore.
This is a classic flight of business. You hear
nothing of it, till it's almost gone and it
takes a mammoth effort just to hold on to
the business.
If you look at it from another perspective,
you might even be getting equal to or
slightly less business from your customer.
Naturally this doesn't ring any alarm bells.
However, if you've been watching carefully,
your customer has probably grown bigger
and richer in the past few months or years.
If your business with them has not grown
exponentially, you are actually LOSING
OUT.
No matter how successful your business,
you will always have scope for improvement. Best of all, you will always have com-
Never Trust a 'Silent' Customer
By Sean D'Souza
plaining customers. Don't deny the fact.
Accept it and then do something about it.
The Real Reason Why You Lose Customers
Last month we went to KFC to pick up some
chicken and chips for dinner. On the way
home we discovered that the chicken and
the chips were soggy and tasted terrible.
How would most customers react? It would
depend on their history with the product,
but most people would grumble and simply
not go back. We complained. We picked up
the phone and called the toll free line at
KFC. They asked us to place our order. We
said we didn't want to place an order, we
just wanted to complain. They said, "We
don't take complaints on this line. You'll
have to call the manager at the branch
where you bought it and talk to him."
Now Why Would I Bother To Go Through All
That Trouble?
It's easier to never go back. All that money
that KFC spends trying to get new customers is going down the drain and out the
back door because they don't have a complaint line.
Most companies act precisely in the same
manner. For one, they have no real complaint department. If clients are unhappy,
they feel embarrassed to complain and because no route has been cleared to vent
their feelings, they avoid it completely.
Then they leave.
Obviously, you can't wait for something to
go wrong. Your job is to find ways to get
the client to complain. If they complain, you are getting feedback that is
extremely valuable and is probably
relevant for all your other clients as
well. Best of all, empowered with a complaint channel, a well-trained client will
complain at every juncture giving you the
opportunity to fix the problem and regain
their trust.
How Companies React to Complaints
Virgin Airlines CEO, Richard Branson, sometimes makes an appearance at the gates
when a flight is late, apologizing profusely
to all passengers as they check out. How
mad would you continue to be if you ran
into a situation like this?
Yet most companies detest complaints. Living in their ivory towers, they refuse to believe that any of their clients would leave.
So they never ask for feedback. On the rare
occasion that clients get mad enough to put
it in words, it's too late. Even then, a complaint is treated with nuisance value.
The first step a company takes when
dealing with complaints is that they fix
it. Yeah, Right!
Because of their crummy service, the plane
took off without you, you missed your
meeting and lost more than just your temper. Do you think, just replacing something
is going to erase all that trouble? It's going
to take much, much more. A simple