Business owners should work towards winning back some of their old customers.
How To Win Back Old Customers
From time to time, it is important for business owners to work towards winning back some of their old customers that may have gone to competitors for one reason or the other.
Customers are one of, if not the most important part of any business. And that is why the old saying of the wise says ‘customer is king’. However, most organizations usually make the mistake of trying to get new customers and forgetting about satisfying the old ones. It’s even as bad as some businesses don’t know how many old customers they have lost, let alone try to get them back.
What they fail to realize is that if you don’t make any effort to win back old customers, you would lose your new customers in the same vein. Here are some tips on how to win your lost customers back.
Identify those who left: If you want to win back old customers, the first thing you need to do is to look at people who have left you. Do, you have the information on customers defection in your company. Any serious organization should want to know how many customers have stopped doing business with them. That is the first thing you would want to know.
Find out why they left: You would also want to know why they have defected. What is it that made them leave you and go do business elsewhere? Is it that they don’t feel your delivery on your grand promise? Is it that your prices are not compensating? Could it be that you competitor has a better product? Or someone annoyed them within the organization? It could be anything and you would not get the answer except you find out from your lost customer why they have defected.
Re-strategize: After finding out why they are no longer doing business with you, you get back to your organization to ascertain whether those issues have been fixed. If you haven’t fixed those issues, there is no point in trying to win back lost customers.
After fixing the issues, you look at your list of lost customers and ask yourself, if you want all of them back, because the truth is that not all customers are profitable. The cost of servicing them is much higher than the additional revenue they yield to the organization.
So, you want to find out, do I really need to win all these customers back. But at the end of the day, it bores down to the data that you have on your customers. If you look at their performance over a normal a number of years you have been doing business together, you would be able to identify the profitable ones. And you might want to focus your win back campaign or strategy on those profitable customers. This is because not all lost customers are worth winning back.
Now, if you have identified the customers that are worth bring back, you would now plan how you want to approach them to get them back. You should know that this wouldn’t be an easy game because they have once been your customer and they already have their impression about you. You have to be able to convince them that, things are much better like you have better prices and product, improved customer service system, more courteous and dedicated staffs etc.
You can communicate with them via phone call, sms, face to face conversation, emails or you might even offer them incentive. Decide what strategy you want to adopt.
After doing this, you remember that it all about relationship. If eventually some of them agree to come back because not all of them would agree to come back, you endeavor to keep a tab on them from time to time to find out how they are doing and if they are now satisfied with either your product or service. But it is very important that what made them to live you initially must be fixed and shouldn’t reoccur again.
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