Customer Winback Programs: Are they worth it?

Is a Customer Winback Program worth the hassle?

Emphatically “Yes”! 

There are lots of reasons, other than the economy, why you might be losing customers. Customers could’ve been frustrated by delays, or aggravated by one bad experience. They could be annoyed by lack of response from you, or seduced away by your competition. 

The point is: “If you are losing customers—do you know why?” 

There’s a big difference between customers who are gone and customers you can win back. Unfortunately, most sales managers and salespeople don’t make that distinction. 

And many executives neglect to direct their managers to ferret out the reasons why customers are defecting. Why? In the rush to get new business—we ignore lost business—even though in many cases the closing ratio for winning back lost customers can be much higher than the ratio for new business. And the reasons for customer defection are vitally important. 

A customer winback program is valuable for three main reasons (1) you win back “lost” revenue (2) you can uncover potential weaknesses in your organization, and (3) you can discover potential threats from the competition. 

4 Steps to Customer Winback Success

Here are some ideas for creating your own customer winback program: 

1. Track your losses and your winbacks
You need to establish a system for identifying lost business and recovered business. Is a lost customer someone who hasn’t bought from you in a month, in six-months, in a year? It’s different from business to business. But if you’re not measuring your lost customers, you’re not managing your customers very well. Identifying which customers is active and which is inactive is vital for establishing and running a successful customer winback program. 

2 Put a senior manager or director in charge
You can’t expect a junior person to handle this job. A senior manager or executive is truly representing and speaking for the company. Priority number one is to visit the client in a face-to-face meeting, and get to the root of ‘what went wrong’. Use your ears and mouth in proportion to one another, take notes, use your active listening skills to show the client you really care. 

3. Re-establish the lines of communication
Your might ask for a meeting with top management, send a personalized letter from the CEO, or ask for a new new needs-analysis meeting. This all flows from the first face-to-face meeting where you discover the problem and refine your approach. 

4. Document Your Successes
Customer Win-backs is a process—and with practice it should be a repeatable one. It may take you ten steps instead of the previous three, but once you’ve won back several customers, you’ll begin to see patterns that you can use to reduce customer attrition. The whole process should help you garner valuable information to help you run your business better. 

Next time you speak with your customer ask: “What result are you looking for in (the next period of time) that will make you continue to do business with us?” Knowing these expectations makes your life much easier and increases your chances of retaining that client. 

Winning back customers is not for the meek of heart. There may be some confrontation, and you will undoubtedly hear things you don’t want to hear. However, it’s hard to correct a problem you’re not willing to discuss. At the very least you’ll discover the weaknesses in your organization that caused your customers to defect in the first place. 

Moving forward it would be wise to recall Ben Franklin’s aphorism that “An Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure.” Manage your customer’s expectations at the beginning of the relationship, not the end. 

Happy Win-backs!

If you need help implementing a Customer Winback program, please contact me today.

1 Comment

• 
  Art Williams October 19, 2011 at 6:13 am

  Yeah Les, you’re right about the value of Customer Winback campaigns. We do them in the call center business too (that I’m in) but we don’t think companies realize how valuable the information can be and how easily affordable it is to use our Philippines call centers (we manage several) to get that information. It’s just like Military Intelligence in the Army….being ‘in the dark’ about what’s going on on the battlefield can get deadly expensive.

  Regards,
  Art
  CMO
  Piton-Global

  Reply