Do you have customers that leave suddenly? You've been doing this outstanding job for them, lavishing them with truckloads of service and yet they're gone 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 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. When a study was done on one 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 some 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 is, you will always have scope for improvement. Best of all, you will always have complaining 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 them.

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 through 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 section. 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.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sean D'Souza uses age-old psychology, marrying it to modern technology, on his Web site, psychotactics.com. Can "psychological tactics" make a difference? Go there and find out.