Machinery dealers know it is far more expensive to find new customers than to keep the ones they have. Yet, relatively few have formal programs to KEEP THE CUSTOMER. The cornerstone to Customer Retention is a good service-level monitoring effort. Once the entire organization is focused on providing excellence in customer support, a program to monitor service and support levels in each department should be put in place. The primary reason to monitor customer service is because most unhappy customers will not complain. They Just Go Away! One recent national survey by a machinery manufacturer indicated that overall, its dealers were aware of only one in seven major customer problems! The secret to Customer Retention is to catch issues and questions far before they become problems. What’s an Easy Way to Keep Your Customers Buying from You Longer? To understand the challenges equipment dealers face in their businesses, Winsby analyzed over nine years of invoices for more than 150 equipment distributors. Included were over 450,000 customers and in excess of 15 million transactions. We were looking for patterns and for ways to reverse any that resulted in negative growth. Length of time as a customer First, we looked at how long customers had been doing business with the equipment dealers. The data varied significantly, depending on how it was sorted. READ FULL ARTICLE>>
