Winning back customers is impossible to do through employees who don’t care about your customers. It’s highly difficult to win back customers with inefficient operations that cause you to charge higher prices or rob you of the ability to be responsive to serving the needs of your customers at a profit.
The primary challenge to overcome with the win-back strategy is that your former customers have experienced your business and elected not to do business with you anymore.
Before you invest time and money in trying to win back customers, you must first be able to retain your active customers. If you aren’t retaining those who bought from you in the last year, you aren’t in a position to win back those who stopped buying from you.
Overview
Acquiring new customers is one of the hardest things to do in business. Getting customers to come back to you is the hardest business growth strategy because they have already experienced what it’s like to do business with you. The degree of difficulty associated with convincing people to buy from you again is shaped by the quality of the experimentation experience they have with how well your products and services solved their problem.
If, after their purchase, your product or service fails to deliver as promised, your odds of getting this customer to buy again from you are tough because what they expected from their purchase didn’t match what they experienced. Customers who have a failed experimentation, as shown through the consumer-to-retained customer progression model, get here because someone along your sales process over-promised.
An overpromise resulting in an under-delivery will never result in a customer bonding with your company through their purchase experience.
The other most common reason for a customer not to continue to do business with you lies in your employees. Every time a customer feels that your employees don’t care about them or their company, they will stop buying from you unless you are the only game in town. Customers stop buying from you based on how they are treated. You have a problem if you employ people who don’t care about the customer and their experience with your company. If this is the case for your business, the customer win-back strategy will never be a business growth option for your company. For that matter, the customer maximization strategy won’t work either.
The key to getting and retaining more customers lies in your people and their belief in the value they place on what they do for your company and, ultimately, your customers. Before adopting the customer win-back growth strategy, revisit your customer value proposition to ensure your people are aligned with the promises you are making to your customers; otherwise, all you will have is problems.