A title on one of my recent blogs was Like Fingernails on a Blackboard. One of the people on the Zayo team felt as passionately on that topic as me–but she felt a better title would have been Like a Pencil in the Eye. Well, I know she will be pleased that title was still available for this post.
“Disconnects just happen.”
Give me a pencil. Give me Scarano’s eye.
It is true that disconnects are sometimes unavoidable: a customer might move, their business might shut down or their needs might change in a way that your company simply can’t address. My educated guess is that the majority of disconnects do not fall into this unavoidable category.
“I have a report that will show you are wrong,” you might be thinking. Be careful. Read the previous post. Is the report tabulated using ‘objective reality’ or is it influenced by ’subjective ass-covering’? Let me explain.
Let’s say we had a tracking process to explain reasons for disconnects. The process had only two check boxes.
Check box #1 if the customer disconnected for any of the following reasons:
- Customer moved to a geography ourside our service territory
- Customer went bankrupt
- Customer’s needs changed in a way that we were unable or unwilling to serve them
Check box #2 if the customer disconnected for one of the following reasons:
- I have no idea; I’ll check with the customer and get back to you
- I just got this account last quarter; can you check with the previous account exec?
- The decision-maker changed a few months back–I haven’t gotten around to building a relationship with her replacement yet
- I have bigger accounts I’m worried about
- Why would I care? My commission check is based on new sales. It is hardly worth my time to preserve existing revenue.
- The customer upgraded their service and, in the process, choose a different provider; by the time we found out what was happening, it was too late
- A competitor offered better pricing; if we only knew, we could have saved them
- The service from us was out-of-term. I didn’t want to bring this up for fear of losing them as a customer
- Our service has been spotty. If I were them, I would have switched too.
- The customer needed things from us that required a few simple modifications to our product. It is easier to move a mountain that to get something out of marketing and IT.
Got the picture? Assume you can do something to avoid the majority of disconnects. Use this assumption to improve customer retention. Don’t be too quick to rationalize that disconnects just happen.
Come to think of it, though, there are worse things in life than poking Scarano in the eye with a pencil.
Leave a response (0 so far)
Subscribe via RSS
