In early January, Martijn Linssen made the case that companies were structurally unable to focus on customer retention. He claims that the urge for the new and the ease of measurement compared to retention doom the effort to focus on existing customers. In addition, addressing the problems of disgruntled high-value customers takes more than a little work.
We all know that the cost of retaining customers is usually less than 20% of the cost of acquisition. Yet really focusing on retention has been a challenge to many companies, including some of our clients.
What approaches have you found to build and maintain that critical focus on building relationships with existing customers (particularly high value ones)?
Disgruntled employees, dissatisfied customers - they're there, but when do they turn into problems, meaning lost employees, lost customers? And do we get blamed if that's the case? If not, what's there to fear? If nothing to fear, what is it that drives us?
Fact of the matter is, that getting away with lost employees and customers is rather easy - it doesn't really lead to Punishment in most cases. Brand a lost employee as "desired exit", brand a lost customer as "trouble-making margin-squeezer" and all of a sudden they turn into socalled "non-regretted losses", aka collateral damage.
Acquiring something new is visible to all, it tackles a known issue, you can get a budget for it, it's something you can tell the press and be proud of.
Prolonging or fixing something old is visible to only a few, it tackles a largely unknown issue, hard to get that budgeted, and when telling the press, the first thing they say: So you have a problem with dissatisfied [fill in the blanks]?
If you want to retain, you need absolute openness and 100% transparency between all parties involved. Try making that happen in ye olde enterprise.
