Every business wants to thrive, not just survive. Here are 5 mistakes that indicate that you are losing customers.
Most businesses think that the key to thriving is to get more customers. But the real key is to be profitable.
More customers don’t always yield a higher profit. Companies spend a lot of resources on acquiring new customers. Many times, these resources exceed the revenue earned, forcing companies to post losses despite increasing market share. That’s not a sustainable way to run a business.
The key to higher profits is to have repeat customers. They have the potential to yield ten times more than their first transaction value, refer people in their circles to you which reduces your marketing cost and sales cycle, and become your advocates thus positioning your business as a reliable and trustworthy brand.
But in the quest to acquire more customers, most businesses fail to retain their existing ones. In doing so, they lose out tremendous opportunities to increase profit and scale up.
Don’t fall into the same trap as them by committing any of the following mistakes which can turn in losing customers.
- Not Maintaining Logs of Customer Complaints
This is the most common mistake that enterprises commit.
Every day, businesses receive complaints from customers. When they don’t log these complaints, businesses don’t know whether they are addressing important issues or just running in circles.
If you keep listening to the latest and loudest customers, the profitable ones will quietly move their business to your competition. You need a mechanism to log all issues and prioritize the ones that will help you satisfy profitable customers.
- Not Monitoring Issue Statuses
Many organizations think that simply deploying CRM software to log customer complaints is enough.
But without tracking the statuses of logged issues, businesses will never know whether customer complaints are getting resolved quickly, or whether they’re getting addressed at all.
If you don’t monitor problems and prevent them from occurring again, customers will end up complaining about the same things over and over again. Eventually, they will get frustrated and leave, draining your resources and profit margins.
- Your People Don’t Follow Processes
Many leaders of organizations have a common complaint – their people don’t follow systems and processes because they feel it’s a waste of time. The same leaders believe that their people perform productive tasks at work.
This is as good as believing that children are prepared well for exams without making them take class tests.
You cannot identify whether people are doing their work until you track it. And you cannot track work effectively until it’s entered into a system. Not using systems and processes is a sign of an inefficient organization, one that loses customers faster than it gets new ones.
As a leader, you must set an example by using systems to review whether people are fulfilling their KPIs. Only then will your company deliver on its promises to customers and ensure that they keep returning to do business with you.
- No Feedback Mechanism
Feedback is scary because businesses won’t like what they hear. Yet, without feedback, a business doesn’t have scope for improvement.
In organizations without a feedback mechanism, people often manipulate data and facts to make themselves look good at the expense of the customer. And valuable customers don’t complain that people are not helpful; they simply leave.
Successful companies don’t just listen to customer feedback; they also implement it to improve their own systems and processes and deliver better customer experience.
- Not Staying in Touch with Customers
It’s common to see companies get in touch with truly profitable customers once in a while and say, “Long time, no order.” And it’s equally common for them to realize that those customers have shifted to another provider.
Customers have a ton of work on their plate – everyday tasks, being hounded by sellers, and solving problems of their own. If your people don’t stay in touch with them consistently, they’ll forget about the work you’ve done and value you’ve provided.
Relationships are an important component of business today, especially with the surge in competition. If you don’t maintain relations with profitable customers, you’ll either lose them or will have to slash your prices to retain them.
Staying out of touch with profitable customers has another serious disadvantage: you stay out of touch with the market pulse and get caught unaware when trends and patterns change.
Repeat customers are crucial for every business that wants to sustain in the long run – even for businesses like Amazon and Apple. It’s important to acknowledge them and get your people to do the same..
Take care of your important customers. When you make them feel important through your actions, they’ll take care of your profitability and growth. Hope this article will help in not losing customers
