How well mapped out is your organisation’s customer journey?
It always amazes me that mobile phone companies are good at winning new customers but make little effort to retain them – with all their offers being made to attract new clients (often at the expense of losing existing clients because they can’t take up the offer).
This is an extremely poor business model and pays little attention to the customer journey. It is multitudes more cost effective to retain an existing client than it is to acquire a new one (although of course we want business strategies to do both).
Mobile phone providers may be the worst at this but how many SME businesses are guilty of the same issue?
Mapping your customer journey is a crucial part of being able to win and retain customers over the long term. Yet most companies don’t do it! Instead they focus their sales and marketing efforts primarily on winning business with little thought on retaining them.
Organisations should plot their customer journey over time and identify the key interactions, communications and activities at each stage of their relationship with the client. This will enable them to proactively manage the relationship and continue to delight their clients at all times (and by ‘delighting clients’ I don’t mean over service them – which is another topic entirely!)
As a Brighton based business coach, this is a topic I am talking with clients about more and more frequently, and it’s a subject that becomes particularly relevant as the economy starts to grow again.
So have you mapped your client journey and do you have account development plans in place for your top clients?