For the past 25 years, I’ve been analysing customer feedback and behaviour data across a range of industries. What I’ve learned is that regardless of the industry, customer retention comes down to one core driver – how well the business continues to meet the expectations of its customers. In particular, does the sales process set expectations that the business can’t deliver on. Read on to discover if your sales process is causing customer churn.
While some customer churn is unavoidable, most customers leave because their experiences don’t consistently deliver what they expected. Of course the time lag between frustration and cancellation varies. Brand loyal customers may have more tolerance than new customers, and some maybe trapped by minimum length contracts. But this doesn’t change the core problem.
Businesses set initial expectations through their sales and marketing processes. Expectations the rest of the business are often unaware of. Consistent experiences require all departments to be on the same page. All departments need a shared view of the end-to-end experience and how each department contributes to it. If they’re not all on the same page, then it’s left up to individual staff to decide what good looks like and how important it is.
Is your sales process causing customer churn?
To check how well aligned your business is, ask yourself 3 questions:
– Do our sales & marketing teams make promises that the business needs more than 30 days to consistently deliver?
– How do we ask our new customers about the experiences they expect from us?
– What % of new customers do we check in with after 30-60 days, to see how well we are meeting those expectations?
Until recently, these three steps didn’t get done consistently because they required a slow and manual process. MyCustomerLens enables managers like you to automate customer listening so that you can see these insights in real-time. To learn how we’re helping organisations like yours to eradicate customer blindspots, and improve customer retention, click the link above to get in touch.
