Why are customers lost?

The first sale involves making promises, while the repeat sale requires keeping them.  This is at the core of why many customers are lost.  Promises made and expectations set during the sale have not been meet.

Customers are lost when the promise is greater than the product, or the performance.  There are lots of words to describe when this happens:

• Product Quality
• Service Quality
• Delivery Problems
• Poor Customer Service / After-Sales Support
• Poor Account Management
• Poor Communication
• Project Management Failures

The implication for sellers is that they must manage the expectations, manage the performance and continually communicate the benefits achieved by customers post sale.

As far as buyers are concerned must suppliers are expendable.  This is a real problem in tough markets where there are many suppliers chasing few customers.  That means your customers are at risk of being lured by the competing promises of other vendors.

So, keeping the promises you made last quarter or last year may not be enough.  It is vital that sellers must be proactive, rather than reactive in terms of meeting the changing needs of their key customers.

Posted by Ray Collis on Nov 16 2010. Filed under 3. Forget Customer Loyalty, Customer Loyalty. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry