Peady’s Selling Engagement

If you think customer satisfaction is enough to keep customers from leaving you. Think again!

Although customers may have had a great experience working with you and your company, are satisfied and would recommend you to others; changes in circumstances have the potential to affect their perceptions, expectations, and ultimately working with your competition.

Welcome to this week’s post on sales and selling success.

My friend, author and speaker Jason Jennings said: “satisfied customers leave” and many studies show that up to 67% of ‘satisfied’ customers will leave or churn. The post “40 Customer Retention Statistics You Need to Know” supports this and shows some fascinating metrics.

So, what’s the answer?

It’s more than just ‘satisfaction’. You can’t grow your customer base or client portfolio if your good customers keep leaving on a regular basis. And its not always about ‘extraordinary’ customer service. Its simpler than that.

Read any number of customer service studies or research pieces and a simple theme emerges: “we’re not looking for over the top service to stay loyal – just do what you said you’d do”. In other words, make it easy to work with you and your company, solve problems, deliver what was promised, fix errors quickly.

Start at the start

Figure out the four or five basic expectations customers have for your product or service and find out if you are executing them flawlessly (and regularly).

How? Well don’t send them a Survey Monkey questionnaire! Seek some simple feedback by asking questions like these during one of your regular meetings.

• What do you want me to do more of?
• What should I do less of?
• How can I improve our service? Does it meet your expectations?
• Does my product/service do what I promised?
• When you talk to others in my company do they follow up?

In some cases, you might be shocked by the response but that’s okay, better to know while they are still a customer so you can fix it. 
 

Customer service is a powerful sales tool

In his book “The Sales Bible” Jeffrey Gitomer says, ”customer service is the never-ending pursuit of excellence to gain a high level of loyalty”. 
He then asks “once you make the sale are you as intense to keep the customer as you were to find them?

Think about this

Customers are no longer basing their loyalty on relationships and prices. Their loyalty is far more dependent upon the service they receive, their experience of a business and their level of satisfaction.

A happy customer is a repeat customer and repeat customers are “gold”.

Maybe this could be a great discussion to have at this week’s sales meeting?

Until next week, good selling!
 

About the author 

Stephen Pead is a media industry veteran of 30 years with significant experience in direct sales, sales management and general management. He is based in Sydney and specialises in helping SME’s market their businesses more effectively and providing training for salespeople and sales managers.

He can be contacted at [email protected]