Gone but Not Forgotten: Five Steps for Regaining

Customer Trust and Customer Revenue

By Jeanne Bliss, CustomerBLISS, Sep. 18, 2008, http://www.customerbliss.com/

Every business has customers who have departed.

There are a variety of reasons that prompt departure. And how you react to the departure will either validate that they left for a good reason, or begin the process of bringing back that customer and that customer revenue.

In fact, companies that do a great job of winning back departed customers will frequently have a stronger relationship as a result.

Follow these five steps to identify and regain customer trust and relationships:

Track customers who have departed.
Most companies only track customer retention as a percentage of their business. They often don’t get down to the number and the actual customers who have departed. This effort must be about caring about the customers who left not just the percentage or how they impact your balance sheet. So the first is to quantify the volume of customer and the volume of business that departed. This can be done monthly or quarterly, depending on the volume of your business model.
 

Segment and identify those who departed.
All customers who have departed, especially if you have a high volume business, are not contributing the same value to your business. So now you need to make some hard decisions. Segment the customer base of departed customers and make a determination which you will reach out to for recovery.
 

Reach out to customers with respect, reason and reconciliation.
Now that you know who you want to save, reach out to them with a phone call. My suggestion is to have two groups within your company make the calls. First, executives should call a handful (1-10) of departed customers in every “rescue” cycle to keep them close to the issues driving customers out the door.

The second group is a specially prepared group of people who are trained in a recovery conversation with the customer. This is not a sales pitch. The first part of the conversation is apologizing that the customer left. The second part is listening, intently to the customers’ explanation. The third part is diagnosing and verifying back to the customer why they departed, and cataloguing this information for the company. And the fourth part is extending support and immediate assistance in resolving the issue. Finally, there should be an offer (not a pitch) extended to the customer to bring them back. These skills need to be developed and this can be a very rewarding project for your best call centre folks, or for exceptional managers within your company. I would not outsource this.