How to Keep Your Customers by Thinking Ahead of Them

Posted: November 30, 2012

Don't let a customer leaving you for another business be a surprise, take steps to prevent it from happening. You need to be proactive and learn the points at which you can connect with them – before they consider leaving at all.

At certain predictable points, customers start thinking about leaving you for someone else. How to find those points and intervene.

In the last post, I pointed out that it was more important to deepen your connection to your existing customers than to spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out why certain customers left.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t care about losing customers. Customer attrition and churn can kill your bottom line. But once customers are gone, they’re gone. The best way to hang on to them is with a process I call “closing the backdoor.”

The winning game is to own your customers for life. To do that, you need to anticipate, meet, and try to exceed their needs and their expectations.

The key word here is “anticipate.” We now have the tools and data to totally manage our customer relationships--if we invest the time and money, and if we know what we’re looking for. Your job is to monitor your customers’ progress and jump in at the appropriate juncture to make the next connection and the next sale. You never want the customer “to come up for air,” because once he or she reenters the marketplace and starts shopping around, your job becomes a million times harder.

So how do you know when to act, and how do you preempt or intercept the customer at exactly the right time in the relationship?

The answer is actually easier than you would think, because every customer will move through the same cycle. You just have to understand and learn how to measure and manage these cycles.

To my mind, this is the most valuable chart you will ever see. Yes, it applies to your customers, but it also applies to your current relationship or marriage and to every other significant personal connection you will ever have.

Read the entire article How to Keep Your Customers by Thinking Ahead of Them at Inc.

Biz Tip Provided by Swanson Russell via Twitter