SALESU

Never Trust A Quiet Customer

by Sean D' Souza

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 common denominator: "without a word." The silent ones are always the most dangerous.

If you want to keep your customers, you've first got to keep them noisy.

A Bain & Company survey of major corporations shows that on average, U.S. corporations lose half their customers in five years. Notice, it isn't one year or suddenly. Clients have a tipping point.

Like a patient Buddha, they will seemingly appear to put up with everything, until 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 then it takes a mammoth effort just to hold on to their business.

They get unhappy bit by bit and then it's camel backbreaking time.

What's really weird is that you can't always measure how much business you're actually losing. Customer research conducted by a bank showed that it had as many accounts as it had one year prior. What the study failed to measure, however, was how many customers had "silently" transferred their money out into other banks, leaving the closure of the account as a last measure to be tackled somewhere down the line.

Similarly, business from each of your customers may be flat or even down a little from the previous year. This doesn't always ring any alarm bells.

But if you've been watching carefully, your customer has probably grown bigger and richer in the past few years. If your business with them has not grown exponentially, you are actually losing out.

No matter how successful your business, you always have room for improvement. Best of all, you will always have complaining customers. Don't deny the fact. Accept it and do something about it.

Few companies have a true 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.

If they complain, you're getting feedback that is extremely valuable and is probably relevant for 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 Do You React to Complaints?

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.

Lots of companies ran themselves into the ground trying to achieve zero defects.

In an unpredictable world like ours, that goal is unreal. Even the best intentions aren't much use if you run into a flash flood. Clients recognize this, but it's up to you to have a disaster recovery plan in place.

When I say that, I don't mean a grandiose "In case of a nuclear attack" plan.

Virgin Airlines CEO Richard Branson sometimes makes an appearance at the gate when a flight is late, apologizing profusely to all passengers as they check out. How can a customer stay angry if he runs into a situation like this?

At Nordstrom stores across the U.S., salespeople are empowered to do whatever it takes to fix a problem, even if it means going to the store across the street and buying the product at a higher price.

It's called the art of immediate recovery, and it assumes that something will go wrong and you will have a Plan B to fix it. The more you prepare yourself for this inevitable event, the less chance the client has to complain.

More often than not, a complaining client is complaining about everything but the product. How often do you see people complaining about food at a restaurant? The principal purpose of the restaurant is food, yet people leave because of loud music, bad service and everything else. Your job is to assume you're a restaurant and find out what your "everything else" is.

 

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