Have you noticed a lot of small niggling complaints all of a sudden?

Many of us are busy with the day to day running of our businesses, dealing with the minutiae, but have you noticed a lot of niggling little complaints coming in from your customer base? You could ignore them but beware, this can be indicative of something more fundamental going wrong with either your product offering or what your sales staff are promising, to secure the customers’ orders.

If you analyse each and every complaint, you may well discover that commonly they are a little on the spurious side, perhaps even a little petty and it is likely that there is no pattern to them either.

We have seen something similar to this happening recently at a holiday company where the poor handling of a single big issue when compared to others in the industry, has led to a cascade of bad feeling. This in turn, now means that every statement is misinterpreted and read as negative and every minor issue, which in the past would have been either ignored or dealt with ‘at some point’, now becomes a serious matter to be given an instant response.

It is this difficult to measure negativity which can be the most damaging to your business, even if you only look at things from a purely financial point of view as it has long been understood, that it costs significantly more to find and win new customers than it does to keep existing customers (some think up to 8 times more and some as much as 10 times more!). On top of this, you also have to consider the personnel cost of dealing with the small but ‘serious matter that must be given an instant response’. Have you considered how many of these energy-sapping customers you have, and how this has happened?

Following on from our recent blog ‘What next now that the Lockdown is ready to be eased?’ https://www.facebook.com/creativelyyoursweb/posts/2559983484242523 the key take-away from today is to make sure that your entire team focuses on the Lifetime Value of the customer. Far too often we hear the phrase ‘but they only spent…..’ or ‘the order is only worth…’ – the damaging phrase to look out for is ONLY this shows short term thinking and already the mentality is there to move the customer on to another supplier. Yes, today they ONLY spent a small amount, but how about the value of the repeat business? And the immeasurable value of personal recommendations you could be missing out on?

By working hard to go above and beyond the customers’ expectation consistently, you can move customers from being energy draining detractors, who are keen to jump on every little issue or mistake and will be happy to tell the world that ‘I will be moving my business away as soon as I can find an alternative’, to actual promotors of your business, who will work with you to resolve problems and are happy to let their contacts know about you.

Creatively Yours…

Creatively Yours Ltd helps businesses like yours succeed online through website design, website development, and our Helponomics system that offers support and training as you need it and highlights areas that could increase your sales.

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