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]
My comment still applies to broadcasting.
This article on why satisfied customers leave is universal; it does only apply to selling time on the air. It applies in general to buying and selling. One of the problems with departing regular customers is that it takes resources to attract replacement customers.
Under the heading "Start At The Start", the simple questionnaire on why the customer left may not be answered any of the questions. It may because the business may not offer the product and/or service and/or package.
Perhaps I can relate that to recent purchase of a washing machine. We have not been buying whitegoods from the same retailer. All the retailers we purchased whitegoods from have been excellent at customer service, price matching and delivery.
Returning to the washing machine, the original LG front loader served our household well for 14 years. It had state-of-the-art direct drive motor and used less power and water. It malfunctioned in July 2019 where the cost of repairs would outweigh the benefits of purchasing a new machine.
In the 14 years, model specifications have changed. With space constraints, I chose a model which had a direct drive model, had a hot and cold water inlet (not all machines have a hot and cold water inlet) and occupied the same space as the former LG.
Now the particular model that met my specifications a Fisher & Paykel was not available at the particular retailer X, but available at another retailer Y. Nothing wrong with retailer X, where we were regular shoppers, but they did not have the model for sale.
Perhaps price was a factor, and indeed it was a factor because the price included delivery and installation.
The counterintuitive was more service for less money!
You may ask: how does that apply to broadcasting?
Mr Pead's article is universal and applies to all kinds of businesses. If we look at subscriber broadcasting, customers wanted to buy subscriptions to specific channels and did not want to have to pay for channels they did were not interested in. For a while that subscription service was a monopoly. Today we have video-on-demand (VOD) services such as Netflix and Stan that are on a subscribe-as-you-need basis and does not compel customers to purchase a block or package.
While I cannot comment on a particular broadcaster's business model, the business that offered the washing machine at a particular price including delivery and installation way below the retail price excluding delivery and excluding installation obviously had a business model that allowed for including the delivery and installation and a profit could be made. Whether the profit was based on each unit sold or by volume is another question.
To illustrate, suppose a small business wants to advertise on commercial radio and has never advertised on radio before.
Does the radio station have a package that includes the production of the advertisement or advertisements and a number of advertisement placements for a particular timeslot or a particular campaign?
Does the radio station have a booking facility if the customer does go through a media buyer?
Does the sales department at the radio station answer your calls and advise on how a small business can have its business advertised on radio? I had a bad experience with 2GB in the 1990s and the sales department did not answer my call about how to get an advertisement.
The buying experience for air time for large entities such as Harvey Norman, The Blind Factory and whatever regular "All On Four" false teeth dental service, BUT what about the small business?
Thank you,
Anthony of where the sun shines, Belfield