One of our electrical consulting clients asked us if we had
a plug to stop his bucket from leaking!
The bucket he was referring to was in fact the number of
clients he was loosing each year.
He had worked out that he was loosing about 20% of his
clients annually. Coupled with the fact that he wanted to grow his company by
15% each year meant he had to generate another 35% more clients.
Not easy to do and think of the cost involved!
The obvious answer to his problem was to get him to reactivate
his past or lost client relationships.
Strangely enough few
firms pay any attention to client retention, let alone have produced an automatic
method of dealing with the problem.
So we got them to:
- Produce a complete list of clients that have stopped doing business with them within the past 12 months
- Break them down ( if practicable) into categories i.e. :
-they have moved out of the area
-your contact in their company has
left them
-there was a problem contract involved
etc
- Establish who best to contact
- Determine a way to make contact with them that is sincere, personal and constructive
- Find a way to get them to tell you honestly what ,if anything, happened and why they aren’t buying from you
- Apologise and thank them for their feedback
- Fix the problem i.e. change or replace something, give a special discount, offer a special deal or service, offer a guarantee of some sort, a free service check-up and report
- Promise and ensure the same issue will not happen again
- Tell them about all the positive changes your company has made since last doing business with them
- Highlight all the new features and benefits they will receive in the future
- Monitor the situation closely going forward
- Deliver fully on all your promises
- On completion of their first order send them a welcome back gift
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