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June 21, 2005
Frightening numbers about customer orientation
If you are running a business, you need to make money. To make money, you need to serve your customers. Without customers, you don't run a business, right? This is in the line of thinking of Peter Drucker who once said something like, that it is the foremost mission of a company to serve customers.
- Only 13 percent of senior management have regular contact with a broad range of customers, and 67 percent do not provide clear, visible leadership in how to attain excellence in customer management.
- 63 percent of companies don't have any idea how many high-value customers they may have lost, and 75 percent aren't aware of the reasons those customers chose someone else.
- In most markets, just 1 percent of a company's customers are worth 30 percent of total margin, but 58 percent of companies say they don't have any special development plans for key clients.
- 41 percent of companies don't record customer contact channel preferences, let alone actually contact customers through their preferred medium.
- Only 10 percent of companies can actually measure service cost at a customer level.
- Although 52 percent of businesses look at the number of customers acquired, only 8 percent pay any attention to the quality of those new customers.
- 65 percent don't even bother to thank new customers, and 42 percent don't try to win back clients who may have turned somewhere else.
The study is from 2003, so actually quite old, but do you actually think that things got any better? I sure don't think so!
Posted by Andreas at June 21, 2005 11:48 AM
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Comments
I think there is either no difference or things prolly got worse. Companies are more profit oriented and couldn't care less about their customers.
Lets take banks for example, previously I said HSBC has the best personnels when it comes to on floor operations but it's the other way round in commercial loan dept. They tend to neglect keeping in proper contact with their customers. When they do, it's because they want to fully exit the account and do not bother whether this company would bounce back after the economic downturn. True enough, after the few years, the company which they turned down started earning big bucks. That is how HSBC lost most of their big customers in this country to Singaporean and local banks.
Posted by: S-Kay at June 21, 2005 01:19 PM