How often do you look at the indicators that a customer is thinking about leaving you? Do you have a process around this, or do find yourself saying “why did this customer leave us?”
What are the possible indicators for a customer leaving:
- Time between purchases
- Decrease in volume
- Time to Pay bills
- Increase/decrease in calls to customer servicce
- Temperature of calls into customer service
- Longer sales cycles
- Time between customer visits
Some of these may be difficult to quantify, but are well worth understanding. I would venture a guess the cost to replace that customer (including lost opportunity value) is less than the effort to put a process into discussing customer abandonment.
If you have stories on how you track customers, or customers you lost and how you should have known, please share them.
PureStone Partners LLC 