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3 reasons your customer accounts are damaged

By Fiona Ness on Tue 26 May 2015 in Sales

Determining whether your customers are happy or not can be an extremely tough job. Tell me something I don’t know right?

Let’s be honest for a second, all businesses have those customers that they know are happy and those that they know aren’t. But identifying your unhappy or on the fence customers and fixing the relationship is tough. The problem is, you can’t afford not to. According to Ask Forensics’ 2015 Sales Analysis report roughly 76% of customers are considered “vulnerable”. This essentially means they’re on the fence about you. And the likelihood is that if one of your competitors approached them they’d easily be convinced to move.

Ok, so this report is based on Fortune companies, however in our experience what Ask Forensics has to say is true of a lot of businesses. The bottom line is you need a way to analyse the stability of your customer accounts.

In order to help you identify these customers I wanted to share Ask Forensics’ top 3 reasons as to why a customer becomes a damaged account. Hopefully knowing this should help you pre-empt the issue and stop your customers even moving into the “vulnerable” category:

  1. Lack of account support
  2. Poor service or quality product
  3. Lack of perceived value

These points don’t require a huge amount of explanation. They’re all predominantly linked to the after sales process. Actually you tend to find that the level of service SMEs give is above and beyond, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to be aware of the state of your customer accounts.

It’s common knowledge that it is much harder, and more expensive, to acquire new customers than it is to keep existing customers, so making sure they are happy is vital. But how do you know if they’re happy or not?

Quite simply, make the right information available to the right people.

Of course you need to actually talk to your customers as well, but you should also be able to easily find information such as which customers are spending less this month than last, which customers haven’t spent in the last x months, how many complaints or issues a customer has logged… the list goes on.

Your plan of action should obviously depend on the structure of your business, but if you don’t already have a central location offering you a complete view of all your customer accounts then you need one. Not only will this mean your team can keep a handle on their accounts but your customers will notice the difference.

Don’t be the business that’s surprised when all of a sudden their customers aren’t their customers anymore. See the problem and fix it.

If you’re not sure how to get a grasp on how happy your customers are why not have a chat with one of the ProspectSoft team to see how we can help?

Original source: Ask Forensics Annual Sales Analysis. You need to fill out a few details to download this report but it’s worth it.