Top 10 Things to Know About Customers Who Leave You

So they left you, so what. You’ve got other customers, nicer customers. One’s who understand and appreciate you. Or do they….

As painful as it is to face rejection, you must look past to get a better understanding about your attrition details. Understanding the who, what, when, where and how customers leave is one of the best resources companies have to understand and improve their business. These top 10 details are essential to understanding and reacting to your specific customer attrition situation.

1. How many are leaving: Knowing how many and what % these are of the total customer base provides an order of magnitude of the issue.
2. What % is this of new Acquisition: Looking at attrition as a % of new customers gives immediate perspective as to the health of the debits and credits in the customer balance sheet. Companies adding significant new customers can afford to ignore lower attrition rates for a while.
3. Voluntary vs Involuntary Attrition: Some businesses that involve financial risk must “fire” customers that have shown themselves to be too costly to retain. Involuntary attrition can thus be healthy and desired to prune away unprofitable customers. That said, high or constant rates of involuntary attrition suggest poor quality customer acquisition targeting or potentially overly conservative risk policies.
4. How many tried to leave: Many businesses have formal and informal processes to retain unhappy customers. When done correctly, these retention efforts can significantly reduce the impact from attempted attrition. Productivity measures include save rate, contact or purity rate, and saves with and without having to offer costly incentives to the customer to retain their business.
5. What’s their tenure/ what stage in the lifecycle: Knowing when a customer leaves give an indication of where the product value proposition or customer service process breaks down..
6. What’s their estimated lifetime value: Believe it or not, all customers are not created equal. From a Netflix customer who is worth $150/year to a big client who brings in millions of billings, it is critical to know the margins of each of your customer segments so you can prioritize efforts to maximize value retained (not customers retained).
7. Why did they leave: This is one that requires a voice of customer survey or some exit survey that collects honest feedback on what went wrong. Capturing customer communicated issues with product value and servicing processesis an invaluable way to understand where to prioritize investment focus.
8. What are they saying about you: One of the most powerful components of the net promoter concept is that positive and negative customer sentiment quickly turns into brand sentiment. With the viral nature of social media, chat and blog forums, one negative experience can be shared with thousands of other existing and potential customers. This type of attrition is double costly as it costs existing and future customers.
9. Where are they going (which competitor): Unless the customer leaves because of retirement, death or moving to Guam, they are likely going to the competition. As such, attrition weakens you while strengthening your competitors. Knowing where customers are leafing for can help understand gaps in your own value proposition and reassess how to compete and with which competitors.
10. What would it take to win them back: Many customers don’t want to leave. From just wanting to be recognized and heard to looking for a free ride, You have to know what investments can be made to win them back and what’s the ROI to make that investment.