Why more than three quarters of your customers are leaving you - and what you can do about it!

The BBC posted a study that said as many as 76% of customers who switch loyalties between companies, claim its bad customer service that forces the change. Over three quarters of clients, customers and patients stop doing business because of basic indifference and lack of attention.

Let me put that into perspective – out of every hundred customers that leave you for whatever reason 76 of them left because you either failed to solve their problem or you appeared to no longer be bothered if they did business with you!

Now we all know that mistakes happen, of course. But the study also found that companies that reach out to talk customers into staying (with an apology and promise to do better) can cut "defections" between brands by up to 85%. This means that if you talk to your customers, clients and patients and try to resolve their problems you can persuade more than four out of every 5 that had a grievance to stay with you!

To put that into real figures this means that out of the 76 clients that would have left – you can persuade 64 of them to stay and continue doing business with you!

The two startling things about these statistics is firstly clients are five times more likely to stop doing business with an establishment than the next common reason – poor quality of product or service! It would appear from this study that it doesn’t matter if what you are selling is poor quality and your service is terrible your clients they are more than likely to stay with you than if they think you’re just not bothered!

Secondly the last time a similar study to this was conducted it showed that 68% of people would leave due to indifference. In only a few years more people are getting fed up with lack of attention and are making their voices heard by going elsewhere!

We often assume that our customers’ main concern is price – but unfortunately in the majority of cases it is not price but value! We can keep the vast majority of our existing clients by simply showing that we appreciate them, that we care and are grateful they are doing business with us. Far too many establishments go all out trying to get new business when they aren’t even bothered to tap into the existing opportunities they already have – existing clients and customers.

If we paid more attention to our few clients, we would have more work from them and a better quality relationship – however we like to get busy with ‘new clients’ who may give us potential large work. There was an expression I heard many years ago that we are to busy chasing the five pound deal that we fail to see and capitalize on the six one pound deals we have overlooked to claim the “bigger prize”!

One way to prevent your clients from feeling forgotten (and I have mentioned this on many occasions and it is still as important now as then) is to make sure that they receive some form of personalized contact from you. This doesn’t mean an email blast or a generic newsletter that goes out to your entire customer list – this means a personalized card or letter. It is so easy to do and it makes you stand out, be memorable and the establishment of choice!