Never Lose A Customer Again summary

If your business is like most, there’s a lot of time and money spent on bringing in new customers, while far less attention is given to holding on to those customers once they’re on board.

In fact, most businesses spend the majority of their marketing budget acquiring customers, but it’s also quite common for these businesses to lose their hard-won customers almost immediately after winning them over.

Imagine dating someone who is lovingly attentive and spares no expense in treating you like the most important person in his or her life. Now, imagine you get engaged to that person, and then, on the day of the wedding, you find out you’ll actually be marrying someone entirely different.

This might sound like a pretty far-fetched scenario, yet it is essentially what happens to many new customers once they decide to do business with a company. This happens because of a flaw in the customer experience: once a client is successfully wooed by the sales and marketing teams, she’s handed over to a customer-service representative in a completely different part of the company.

It’s easy for business leaders to pay lip service to the importance of providing a wonderful experience for their customers. But if you were to press these bosses and ask exactly what they mean by “customer experience,” you’d likely get a lot of vague and uncertain responses.

The fact remains that, no matter how much CEOs talk about customer experience, their businesses are likely to be losing around 20 percent of customers each year. So let’s get to the bottom of what makes a truly valuable customer experience.

In order to provide a perfect customer experience, it’s important to put yourself in the client’s shoes and understand what he goes through when interacting with your business.

As it turns out, there are three initial phases a customer will go through, and if you make the most out of these phases, you’ll be on your way to turning a new client into a devoted one.

It’s a big mistake to think that your work is done once you get a customer’s money. After all, there’s a lot more money to be had if you can turn every paying customer into a vocal supporter of your business, thereby providing you with priceless word-of-mouth advertising.

This is why the customer experience continues beyond the initial exchange of money for goods or services. After the third phase, you can keep the experience going by providing incentives for your satisfied customer to become a zealous promoter and referral engine for your company.