How To Lose a Customer in 3 Easy Steps

In the past 48 hours, a long time service provider to our company, lost our business. You too can easily shed customers if you follow their example.

1. Make it difficult for your customers to interact with you. Last week I spent 15 minutes navigating voicemail, automated attendants and then a "generic call center person" who wouldn't even give me the name of the salesperson I needed to speak to. Their response? "A salesperson will get back to you within the next 2 business days." Not good enough. Not in these economic times. Force customers to do business the way YOU want to, at your own peril.

2. Take your customers for granted. This whole saga began, because we happened to notice the amount of money we were spending to rent some equipment (a time clock). The payroll service had been in place for a decade (and was working acceptably) and so no one bothered to determine whether the service was still price competitive. Like many service providers, the pricing inched up year over year - not by a big enough margin to raise any flags, but over a decade, the pricing became significant. Because I could not get an answer to a very simple question about the pricing for the time clock (see #1 above) we began examining the pricing of the payroll service itself.

3. Ignore your competition. No one at our office can remember the last time anyone from the payroll service provider has ever contacted us. Their business model is geared toward a successful initial setup, then milking the processing fees until the customer wakes up and leaves. They count on the fact that their customers will be lulled into a state of apathy....until they aren't.

My call to a competitive payroll service was returned within 20 minutes. I had a quote on my desk within 90 minutes. Potential annual savings for the identical range of services was 5 figures.

A 10 year customer gone... in 90 minutes.

You too can achieve these amazing results by following these three easy steps!