Are you losing customers to Indifference?
Posted in General Business on February 11th, 2008 by TalitaHere are some interesting statistics that give us food for thought…
Why we lose customers
| 4% | Natural attrition (moved away – passed on etc) |
| 5% | Referred to a competitor by their friend |
| 9% | Competitive reasons (price) |
| 14% | Product/Service dissatisfaction |
| 68% | Perceived Indifference |
‘Perceived indifference’ is when customers feel that you don’t care about them; that they don’t matter to your business and that you couldn’t really care less whether they purchase from you or not.
It is the single most common reason we lose our customers to our competitors. Perceived indifference sends our customers away nearly 5 times more often than dissatisfaction with a product or service and over 7 times more often than for competitive reasons. Clearly, we need to pay far more attention to our attitude towards our customers.
We often assume that our customers’ key concern is price – little do we realise that we can differentiate ourselves and win over our customers time and time again by simply demonstrating that we value them.
As in all relationships: communication is key. We need to let our customers know that we care. Ask them for feedback, reward them and think about other ways in which we can meet their needs.
These statistics are provided by Prof John Gattorna – Macquarie University.
i’ve sent a few people to this post to check out those stats.. very interesting thanks!
That is such a compelling argument. We think we value our clients, and we get on with it.
Often though we are doing this invisibly behind the scenes and the differences may not alway be noticed.
I’ve been working really hard on improving our service. And I have been telling our clients, but understand it when more than one have commented that it hasn’t improved yet.
It actually has across the board, but not everyone experiences it straight away.
And we’re often lax at telling people what we’re doing.
The fact is, any business with sense vallues their clients above all else. But this figure of 66% of perceived indifference really makes you think about what a poor job we are doing about telling clients we’re care about them.
This is an absolutely brilliant post that you’ve put up here. The argument for this is totally true and totally relevant. I think that many of us try and get ‘new business’ because we don’t ever tap in to all the opportunities we already have. Our own indifference hurts us because if we paid more attention to our few clients, we would have more work from them and a better quality relationship. But we like to get busy with ‘new clients’ who may give us potential large work. We end up, most of the time, really wasting our time with these so called “big clients” when we can do really well with our current clients and tap into all the potential business we can find there.
I’d like to add another thing – poor customer support. Although this does not weigh more than any of what you have listed but sometimes this greatly affects the feelings of customers. Not all the time that we get what we want thus we need assistance. Poor customer service would lead to discouragement and negative word of the mouth stories.
I agree that perceived indifference is a huge factor as to why we lose our customers. We must always make it a point that we value our customers above all. Let them feel their importance. A very good service and immediate response towards their queries. If we’re on their shoes, we would not want to be just ignored.