Marketing Tips Week 1 (How To Keep Customers From Defecting)

One way to stop customer defections is to stay in touch at key times. A recent article in Target Marketing magazine featured a story about Sky Alland, a customer relationship management company based in Columbia, MD.

They phoned members of an HMO medical plan two months before their re-enrollment plan was due for renewal.

They cite 77% fewer members defected from the plan as a result of the phone call. The client calculated a 583% return-on-investment from this simple program.

Implementation:

A great way to implement this into your business is to call clients before their service agreements or Mfr warranties are up. If you spend just 1 hour a day calling on your clients to follow up they will be less likely to seek service elsewhere. Some ideas on follow up calls/letters:

1. Call 1.5 months before their service agreement is due
2. Call within 48 hours after service was performed and ask them to answer a few questions regarding the service they had. Then use your Customer Satisfaction Survey to fill out the answers. This Survey should also have some demographics of the clients so that you can learn WHO is your client. This will help in future marketing of your services.
3. Mail a birthday card to the major appliance you installed. If you installed a water heater send out a birthday card to it 1 year later. Include in it ways to prolong the life of the water heater, i.e. replace anode rod (great opportunity to sell a water heater agreement), drain every __ months, etc. Also, any tips on that appliance, do not use HOT water for cooking, etc.
   
4. If a part comes with a manufacturers warranty and business is slow you might call the clients and tell them the warranty is about to expire how has everything been running. I would recommend doing this with MFR’s that will re-imburse labor on repairs.

BONUS TIP#1 – Through QSC (Quality Service Contractors) you can get paid for labor on ALL parts through a program they have. If you want more info call me.

How about you, what types of followup calls/letters do you send out?

Till next week,