Customer Retention

Take this quiz:

what's the most important thing for entrepreneurial success?
[1] Money.
[2] A good idea.
[3] A charismatic leader.
[4] Customers.

Give up? Answer's #4

If you don't have customers, you don't have a business. And if customers keep leaving you for competitors, you have a problem. First it costs a bundle to replace a customer. There's a way to calculate the cost, but believe me it's a bundle. Second, it shows that you've got some work to do. Your product is not competitive; your business has a poor reputation; you're alienating people; or any one of a hundred other things.

But don't just believe me. Read Wikipedia:

Customer Rretention is the activity that the selling organization undertakes to reduce customer account defections. The success of this activity is when the customer account places an additional order before a 12-month period has expired. Note that ideally these orders will need to contribute similar financial amounts to the previous 12 months. It can also be described as a series of actions that the selling organization undertakes to reduce defections. This is the selling organization's perspective of what they have to implement after the agreement in principle stage of the buying cycle. The success of the customer retention process is measured when the customer places an additional order before a 12-month period has expired. Retention Rate is the percentage of the total number of customers who have repeatedly placed an order (or made a transaction) during a twelve month period measured over a number of years, compared to the total number of customers in the same period.

If you have a comment about this, let me know.

All my activities are entrepreneurial. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog; for writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.