WHY CLIENTS LEAVE
A frustration that I think many people feel is when you ring a business, and are put on hold, with the recorded message saying, ‘We are experiencing high call volumes at this time. You call is important to us, so please stay on the line and your call will be answered as soon as possible. And then you are put on hold indefinitely and they play that annoying music.
If your experiencing high call volumes, then isn’t it time to invest in more staff? Especially if it is the 4th or more times I have heard you are experiencing high call volumes.
Or when you finally get through to someone, (who can’t answer your query) or they say they will find out for you, and are told that you will receive a reply back to your question or query at a given time… – and it never happens!
Or when you ring to seek advice or a solution to a problem, and the operator on the other end of the phone lets you know that they will call you back at a prescribed time – and you never hear back.
This also happened to me recently. I rang an Electrical company to ask them to fit some electrical devices. The person who answered the phone, let me know they would ring me back by the end of the day to book the job in.
And guess what – I never heard back from them!
So being bloody-minded, I rang late in the afternoon the next day and said,
“You were going to ring me back yesterday, and I didn’t hear from you.” I said.
“Oh yes, I’m sorry, I was waiting to see if the electrician was available,” they replied.
I asked, “Could you not see from your computer booking system, if the electrician was available or not?”
And then as so often happens, the excuses start. “I’m sorry, our computer system was down!” they said.
To which I answered, “May I ask, how does a computer system being down, stop you from making a phone call to give me an update, like you said you would?”
There was silence on the other end of the phone, until a very timid voice said, “Would it be OK if John came round on Saturday at 10.45am to look at what you need doing?”
I should have said no, but I actually said, “OK, but can you guarantee he will turn up?
As I write this to you, I’m intrigued to see what happens on Saturday.
A corollary to the story:
On Friday night at 9pm I received this txt message.
Hi Pete, please accept our apologies. However, John now has to work tomorrow and will be unable to make the appointment. He has asked if you could kindly send over photos of
the external rear wall, showing the existing external light and also the position you would like the new light fitted.
I thanked them for letting me know, and said no. I went elsewhere the next morning and had the lights fitted 3 days later.
I can only imagine – and quite fairly too, if we said to one our clients that we would ring them back at a given time – and didn’t, they would start wondering how professional we were, and if we were authentic. Quite fairly, I would be out of business pretty quickly – and rightly so. Yet businesses continue day in and day out to not do what they say they will. And we as customers let them away with it. They treat us with disdain, with a very laissez-faire attitude to service and experience, and we let them get away with it.
I believe the only thing necessary for the indifference of good customer experience to continue, is that good clients do nothing to the firm that treats them with indifference.
I read some stats recently as to why clients will leave a business and go elsewhere.
WHY CLIENTS LEAVE!
DISSATISFIED WITH YOUR SERVICE 14%
PRICE/COMPETITION 9%
PERCEIVED INDIFFERENCE 68%
RECOMMENDATION 5%
MOVES AWAY 3%
DIES 1%
Perceived indifference, and Service Dissatisfaction accounts for over 80% of businesses losing customers or clients.
To realise what it could cost you as a business owner to lose clients, look at the Lifetime Value (LV) of each customer. Work it out and you’ll be stunned at what it could cost
you, if you lost them. By making a small difference on how to genuinely look after your client at the first point of contact, has a huge huge impact on your bottom line.
It’s simple; do what you say you will.
Under-Promise and Over-Deliver.
The keys to keeping and retaining long term clients.
