Customer WinBack summary

Many business owners believe that, since the market is full of potential customers, it’s not worth it to spend time and money winning back the ones they’ve lost. “After all,” they reason, “what’s the loss of one customer compared to the many we’ve retained?”

The problem with this thinking is that retention rates, i.e., the number of customers you keep over a certain period, can be misleading.

To illustrate this, imagine a college that retains 80 percent of the students in each class from one year to the next. Seems healthy, right? But if the college starts with a freshmen class of 1,000 students, then the sophomore class will fall to 800, the junior class to 640 and the senior class will have only 512 students.

In addition, firms are largely unaware of both the substantial losses associated with customer defection and the substantial benefits of winning customers back.

The loss of just a single long-term customer means that companies have to expend resources – marketing materials, sales personnel costs, etc. – to acquire a new customer to make up for lost revenue.

Moreover, losing a customer offers firms a valuable experience. There is a reason customers leave in the first place, and uncovering that reason can help to both win customers back, retain existing customers and even acquire new ones.

Unfortunately, however, many companies see lost customers as dead opportunities. Often, businesses have developed a caricature of the lost customer as merely a disgruntled individual with a chip on their shoulder, who would under no circumstances return to their company. It’s no wonder that they don’t even try to woo them back!

But this isn’t exactly true. In fact, studies have found that the average firm is 60 to 70 percent likely to successfully sell again to “active” customers and 20 to 40 percent likely to successfully sell to lost customers. Now compare this to new prospects, where the odds of striking a deal are only five to 20 percent.