Never Lose a Customer Again Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

Audio available

Brief Summary

Never Lose a Customer Again focuses on customer retention and the reasons why businesses often lose such a high percentage of their customers after acquisition. Coleman shares anecdotes about his own experience as a customer to educate readers on customer experience and why loyal customers matter. He talks about the three phases of the customer experience journey and shares the key tips to transform customers into life-long advocates for your business.

About the Author

Joey Coleman is a world-renowned speaker and business consultant with a focus on customer retention. He provides workshops and seminars for Fortune 500 companies. Never Lose a Customer Again is his first book.

Topics

Marketing & Sales

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Key Insights

Speaker and business consultant Joey Coleman talks about an under-appreciated and deeply important aspect of business success: customer retention. Rather than focusing on the allure of attracting new clients, Coleman thinks about customer service and the value of loyalty to reflect best business practices for long-term success. Coleman compares customer retention to wooing a romantic partner and uses some unconventional metaphors (like the dentist’s office) to help businesses consider new ways to approach customer retention.

You can learn a lot about excellent customer service from an emergency trip to the dentist.

We don’t think about the dentist as the ideal place for customer service, but for Coleman, this was exactly the place where he began reflecting on customer loyalty. After biting down on hard candy and experiencing sharp pain in his jaw, Coleman made an emergency appointment with a new dentist’s office. He didn’t have high hopes for his experience, but by the end of his medical journey, the receptionist had made him feel like a valued part of the office’s community. He was a customer for life.

So what did the office do that made them stand out? The receptionist recognized the urgency of Coleman’s visit and rearranged the dentist’s schedule to ensure he could be seen sooner rather than later. Having his problem acknowledged and taken seriously made him feel valuable. The receptionist also went the extra mile and made completing introductory paperwork easy, to avoid time spent in a waiting room, writhing in pain. After his trip, the receptionist called back to check on Coleman, and offer him continued support after his painkillers wore off.

The receptionist didn’t just care about Coleman in order to get his business; she wanted him to have a good experience. From this surprising trip to the dentist, Coleman realized that building a loyal customer base is all about ensuring that each client feels valued.

Most businesses spend lots of money on acquiring new customers just to lose them.

Businesses typically spend the majority of their marketing budget acquiring customers, not focusing on keeping them. And yet, research shows that businesses lose between 20 and 70 percent of customers three months after acquiring them. This is true across industries and in companies of all sizes. Customer retention is a universal problem.

Banks, for example, spend up to $300 per customer to find new recruits. They operate under the assumption that once a person opens a bank account, they’ll keep it. But that’s not actually the case - up to ⅓ of those people will leave within a year of opening their new account.

This happens because customers don’t feel valued after a sale. Sometimes this is the result of fine print in a contract that surprises and upsets them, and other times it's a lack of customer support. To return to the bank example, a customer might sign up and be hopeful, but soon find that hidden fees in their contract or poor customer service at the branch makes the bank a less than appealing choice.