CUSTOMER RETENTION STRATEGIES
Customer retention.

Such a deep mystery. The stuff of great strategy sessions. Of trial and error. Success and failure. Of huge expenditures in technologies, and laborious and pained efforts to measure the return on investment of those expenditures.

Oh, the resources we spend trying to untie this Gordian knot.

I just don't get it.

Call me simple. Naïve. Out of touch with the complexities of modern sales and marketing. (Or worse if you've a mind to.) But it seems to me that there is no mystery to customer retention. To creating a company where customers come back again (and again) when they want to buy the things we sell. For me, it's just four words:

Do a good job.

I think you know it's true.

Do a good job.

WHAT IS A GOOD JOB?
OK. It's not that easy. We have to figure out exactly what a good job is in the eyes of our customers. And a good job means different things for different organizations within our companies.

That's where Marketing comes in. That's what OUR good job is--finding out what a good job means for every organization within an enterprise.

What is good sales activity--activity that makes customers eager to get the call from their sales rep? Marketing knows because we know the marketplace. What is good product--what comprises the ever-evolving whole product? What is good customer service--service that is seen as a consistent, reliable business resource? What is good financial management--which types of investments should our companies make and which should they avoid?

We know, because we know the marketplace.

I'm not suggesting that we're now going to be in the business of telling Sales how to pitch product, or R&D how to build it, or Customer Service how to answer the phone, or Finance which investments to make. I'm insisting however, that we must be constantly reaching out to the market and coming back with detailed analyses of what our markets want (based not on what they tell us they want, but on what they tell us they do--as I discuss at here). Not "call on the customer every quarter" but "stay in touch with information of value even if you have nothing to sell." Not "a removable hatch no more than seven inches from the main control console where a belt can be oiled" but "easier access to maintenance areas." Not "an elimination of phone trees" (as if!) but "faster phone response." Not "buy 10,000 shares of Acme Chemicals" but "avoid investments in companies involved in genetics."

From there, those organizations can do cost analyses, work requirements, feasibility studies and so forth to determine exactly what they can do to satisfy those needs.

What they can do to do a good job.

OK. I see that look on your face. How simplistic. Well, then, answer some equally simplistic questions. What is your company's Good Job Initiative? What specific programs do you have in place to find out what a good job means?. How often do you reach out to your marketplace to ask them? On which wall in your lunch room have you hung the posters that say, simply, "Do A Good Job"? How do you measure your success in doing a good job?

PERFECTING THE BASIC SWING
It's like baseball . . . or cricket . . . or tennis--or most sports for that matter. If you get the fundamentals down, excellence will naturally follow. It doesn't matter how hard you swing the bat--it matters how short the stroke is, how much of your hips you get into it. It doesn't matter how much wrist action you get on the racket. If you want good spin on your second serve, you've got to have the right knee bend and push off.

And when it comes to customer retention, "fundamentals" means continually touching the marketplace and learning what they're doing, and how we can help them do it better. Communicating that to our enterprise. And letting them make decisions about how best to put that into action.

For us, fundamentals means: Do A Good Job.

I'm convinced that if we simply do that, customers will notice--I notice . . . you notice . . . everybody notices. And they'll act accordingly. They'll come back to us the next time they need something we offer.

And if we ask them why, they'll say "I came back to you because you do a good job."

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