The Top 10 Ways to Lose Customers
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Why Not Keep Customers Instead?
Ask anyone in business about their worst customer ever and they’ll be hard-pressed to tell you about
just one.
But ask them about their best customer ever and they’ll
probably have to take time to think about it.
It’s the old 80-20 rule in action; for most people, it’s the
unpleasant, nasty or outrageous that sticks in the memory. The good bits blur.
Which explains why, as business people, we sometimes
forget the basic truth that our customers are our biggest supporters.
They want to think well of us (and our products and
services). They want us tosucceed.
Many of them start dealing with us in the first place
hoping to become repeat customers. It makes people’s lives so much easier if
they can continue to deal with one butcher or one carpet cleaner.
And all they want from us is for us to meet their
expectations – which means not doing any of the things in the following slides.
Learn how to get and keep customers by reviewing the top
ways to lose them, in reverse order from ways that will merely aggravate some
of your customers through ways that will alienate all of them forever.
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#10) Lose customers by: Engaging poorly trained staff.
Imagine that you walk into a store selling blinds,
wanting to purchase some blinds for your home. But although several different
sales people seem eager to assist you, none of them seem to know anything about
blinds! Imagine how frustrating that would be – and how long it would take you
to walk out and take your business elsewhere.
Customers, you see, have an expectation that sales people
at a business will be knowledgeable about that business’s products and
services.
You can get around this expectation, however, by
eliminating this type of hand-holding customer service from your business.
Several very successful big-box chains have done this, expecting customers to
see this as a fair trade for lower prices. And online businesses tend to operate as self-serve businesses.
However, the bottom line is that if your business
operations include a customer expectation that they will be able to interact with
knowledgeable staff, you’d better have some – especially if your sales depend
on it.
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#9) Lose customers by: Restricting your hours of
operation.
A coffee shop that only stays open until 3 p.m. A doctor
that only works two days a week. A bakery that closes for a month at a time so
its owners can go on vacation.
Three examples. Three businesses that have lost customers
(and money!) because of restricted hours that seem unreasonable to prospective
customers.
Now most bricks-and-mortar businesses restrict their
hours to some degree. As customers, we don’t expect to be able to browse
through retail stores or go and get our hair cut in the middle of the night.
But the difference is that we see these as reasonable
restrictions; they make sense to us.
You need to provide customers with what they will
consider to be reasonable access to your products and services. If you don’t, they’ll
find what you’re selling elsewhere.
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8) Lose customers by: Looking unprofessional.
For small business people, the adage “Dress for Success”
should actually be “Dress to Impress (the customer)” because that’s what it all
about – looking like someone that a customer thinks will do the job well,
whether that job is selling people tools to do work on their own homes or
selling people’s homes.
It’s no coincidence, for instance, that Home
Depot’s sales
associates all wear aprons; the uniform, suggestive of a carpenter’s tool belt,
makes them look like handy types who know what they’re doing.
And if you don’t look like you would be good at the job,
customers just move on.
So point 1 is that you don’t need to wear a power
suit; you need to look knowledgeable about whatever your expertise is.
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7) Lose customers by: Making it difficult to do business
with you.
Trying to conduct a simple transaction with some small
businesses is like fighting your way through a blackberry thicket; you end up
feeling all scratched up and wondering why you made the effort.
I personally have seen and/or experienced:
a business where you had to pick up a phone to get buzzed
in to the office – except the phone was around the corner of the building with
no signage pointing to it.
Unfortunately, this is a list that could go on – and I
bet you have no trouble adding examples to it yourself!
Businesses that make it hard for customers to get into
the premises, pay for merchandise, or even make it just about impossible to
even contact them at all do themselves no favours – these are all experiences
customers won’t want to repeat.
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6) Lose customers by: Making it hard for customers to
return goods to you.
Making it hard for customers to return things marks the
halfway point of this survey of ways to lose customers because while it’s
something that really aggravates customers, it’s not something they’ll all
experience.
You may have (and hopefully do have) lots of customers
who will never feel the need to return anything. For them, it probably doesn’t
matter that to return an item to your business, a customer needs to have not
only a properly dated receipt but be trying to return the item between 2
and 3 pm on a Friday in a week with a full moon.
Which is great. Because if they ever do decide to return
something and find out that it’s super difficult or even impossible, you’ve
lost them.
Avoid stress on both your parts and handle returns the right way, so that your customers go away happy and
will be willing to return to your business and buy again.
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#5) Lose customers by: Doing shoddy work or selling
shoddy products.
The most popular way for these businesses to draw
customers in is through loweredprices, either lower than competitors’ or as advertised sales.
They literally don’t care if the customer comes back or
not; their theory is that there are lots of other potential customers out there
that they can lure in and do the same thing to.
And don’t think that this business model is limited to
retailers; it’s especially popular among providers of home renovation services.
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#4) Lose customers by: Being unresponsive.
It’s interesting how forgiving some customers will be.
Even doing a shoddy job for them once is not enough for them to never give you
a chance to sell to them again in some cases.
With way #4, though, we’re entering the realm of the
unforgivable, otherwise known as “things you just don’t want to do if you want
to keep customers and get new ones”.
Being unresponsive to customers can occur at any stage of
the sales cycle.
An interior designer who overrides a customer’s color
choice or a dog groomer who can’t be bothered to fully answer a prospective
client’s questions about her service are both guilty of ignoring a customer’s
wishes.
Unfortunately, in a world of phone texting and social media, customers’ expectations are ballooning. If
you’re feeling stretched too thin to be properly responsive to your customers,
it’s time to hire some help.
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3) Lose customers by: Making the customer feel
unimportant.
Making a customer feel unimportant is even more
unforgiveable in a customer’s view, which is why it comes in a number three.
But it’s so easy to fail. When we do things such as not
returning a client’s call in a timely fashion, not giving them our full
attention when we speak (or worse, interrupting them!) or not providing them
with some sort of acknowledgement when they become “regulars”, we tell them
that they’re not important to us, whether it’s true or not.
Never believe that people will judge you by your words
when your actions say something different.
A trick to help you accomplish this: Who’s the most
important person in your life? Hold this important person in your mind and
treat every customer the way you would treat him or her.
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2) Lose customers by: Lying to them.
This isn’t one of the fastest ways to get rid of
customers, but it’s definitely one of the best.
You’ll get away with it for a while because generally
people want to believe the best of one another and because if you promise a
customer, for instance, that you will definitely, positively have that new
floor laid in five days, it will take them at least five days to discover that
you made them a promise you couldn’t keep.
And then most people will tell themselves that things
happen and you didn’t mean to lie to them and let you tell them the next lie.
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1) Lose customers by: Making the customer feel cheated.
If you need an absolute never-fail way of ensuring that a
customer never darken your literal or figurative doorway again, this is it –
because this is the one thing that a customer will never forgive.
Customers will make excuses for you – to a point.
Shoddy service? You were having an off day.
No return call? You’re really really busy.
A rip-off? We’re done! (And you might be hearing from my
lawyer!)
Now obviously, legitimate business people do not go
around deliberately trying to cheat their customers.
But you have to be careful to avoid the possible
perception that your business is trying to take advantage of customers too.
Sales techniques such as upselling may be viewed this way by the customer, so
before you use them, consider their potential effect; they might not be
suitable for your industry.
Customers’ perceptions of prices are probably the main source of sour feelings
about their transactions. All customers are not seeking bargains, but they all
expect prices to be fair.
For instance, if a customer selects an item to purchase
on Tuesday that you know is going to go on sale the next day, you or your staff
should point that out to them, leaving the customer to decide whether they want
to buy the item today at its full price or tomorrow at discount. If you don’t,
that customer is going to feel mistreated.
And the customer that feels taken advantage of is the one
you won’t see tomorrow.
Remember, the true secret of good customer service is that there is no secret. Offer quality
goods and services at a fair price and treat customers the way you would like
to be treated and those who do business with you will come back again and
again.
