Have you ever really tried to find out why certain customers decide to stop doing business with your company? Why do they go to your competitors? Knowing this can give you invaluable insights about your work and what you need to change about it.
However, as a rule businesses do not spend enough time trying to figure this out. It is lost or ignored in the daily work routine, which gives an incomplete picture of what has gone wrong. If you don’t invest time and effort to collect information on why clients leave, you will never be able to arrange efficient work within your company. Feedback is a precious source of improvement strategies. Otherwise, the picture you see will be distorted and fragmented.
Who is responsible for collecting information of this kind?
Normally, this is the job of the customer service department representatives. Very often the absence of a complete picture is their fault because they have failed to gather objective feedback due to the conflict of interest.
This means that the task of gathering feedback should be given to a third party. The customer service department representatives are unlikely to provide unbiased information. Acting on insufficient or distorted feedback is the wrong approach. In order to make the right decision, you need to have access to genuine information and objective facts.
What is the solution here?
Luckily, there is a strategy you can use and a mechanism you can implement – it is called a “Departed Client Analysis.” This is a system that allows a third party to conduct interviews in order to elicit necessary feedback from the customers who have decided, for one reason or another, to stop doing business with your company.
How can a Departed Client Analysis assist your business?
This system can help you with a number of things. Namely:
- It shows you which competitors the customer chose to go to;
- It demonstrates why your relationship with a client has come to an end;
- It identifies your weak spots as well as your strengths;
- It points out why this particular customer decided to go to a certain competitor and what kind of services/products they’ve been looking for;
- It provides invaluable timely feedback which allows you to act accordingly.
Summary
The truth is that knowing why a customer has left is much more important than knowing why they joined you in the first place. The Departed Client Analysis system is a mechanism developed to show you the reasons why clients leave. As such, it is an instrumental source of information.
By starting a conversation with clients who have left your business, you demonstrate your desire to learn from your mistakes. This can help you win your clients back and improve your services. You will be able to retain more customers, resulting in the attainment of higher revenue and a prosperous future.