Are You Making Recovery Calls to Customers that Left You?

Every business has customers who have departed. There are a variety of reasons that prompt departure.

How you react to the departure will either validate that they left for a good reason or begin the process of bringing back that customer and that customer revenue.

The key to recovery is ensuring there is a planned process to contact, resolve and reconcile the issues with the customers who have departed. There must be an intention and commitment to fix the issues that pushed the customers out the door.

The focus must be to recover the customers AND to fix the company. In this way, the customer rescue process brings back in revenue and prevents future revenue from departing from your business.

1. Track Customers Who Have Departed

Most companies only track customer retention as a percentage of their business. They often don’t get down to the number and the actual customers who have departed. This effort must be about caring about the customers who left, not just the percentage or how they impact your balance sheet. So, the first step is to quantify the volume of customers and the volume of business that departed. This can be done monthly or quarterly, depending on the volume of your business model.

2. Segment and Identify Those Who Departed

All customers who have departed, especially if you have a high volume business, are not contributing the same value to your business. Now you need to make some hard decisions. Segment the customer base of departed customers and then determine which customers you will reach out to for recovery.

3. Call Departed Customers 

Once you know who you want to save, reach out to them with a phone call. My suggestion is to have two groups within your company make the calls.

First, executives should call a handful (1-10) of departed customers in every “rescue” cycle. These calls keep them close to the issues that are driving customers out the door.

The second group is a specially prepared group of people who are trained in a recovery conversation with the customer. This is not a sales pitch.

1. Apologizing that the customer left.

2. Listening, intently, to the customer’s explanation.

3. Diagnosing and verifying back to the customer why they departed, and cataloging this information for the company.

4. Extending support and immediate assistance in resolving the issue.

Finally, there should be an offer (not a pitch) to bring the customer back.

These skills need to be developed and this can be a very rewarding project for your best call center folks or for exceptional managers within your company. I would not outsource this step.

4. Categorize Reasons for Departure and Take Action

After the calls, there is major opportunity for your company to identify the issues that came from all of the calls, and then trend and track these issues. By attaching them to the revenue of the departed customers, these issues can also be prioritized. Within the second session of customer recovery, the most critical issues will emerge and there will be no question what you should focus on. There may also be opportunities that arise from these calls about the frontline service that can provide immediate and specific feedback to the frontline that served the customer and potentially contributed to the customers’ departure. Creating a closed loop process for this feedback is very potent since very specific information usually comes out of these calls for coaching.

5. Put Returned Customers into “Intensive Care”

Once a customer has agreed to return to your business, keep an eye on them. Conduct a review every six months of their experiences, tracking customer service calls, purchasing, support and other indicators which will identify the health of the restarted relationship. Then reach out again. Your close attention will not go unnoticed.