Business; 7 Reasons Customers Quit

1. A typical hears from only 4 percent of its dissatisfied cutomers. The other 96 percent just quietly go away and 91 percent will never come back. That represents a serious financial loss for companies whose people don't know how to treat customers, and a tremendous gain to those that do.


2. A survey on "Why customers quit" found the following:

   - 3 percent move away
   - 5 percent developed other friendships
   - 9 percent leave for competitive reasons
   - 14 percent are dissatisfied with the product
   - 68 percent quit because of an attitude of indifference toward the customer by the owner, manager, or some employee.

3. A typical dissatisfied customer will tell eight to ten people about his problem. One in five will tell twenty. It takes twelve positive service incidents to make up for one negative incident.

4.  Seven out of ten complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve the complaint in their favor. If you resolve it on the spot, 95 percent will do business with you again. On average, a satisfied complainer will tell five people about the problem and how it was satisfactorily resolved.

5. The average business spends six times more to attract new customers than it does to keep old ones. Yet customer loyalty is in most cases worth ten times the price of a single purchase.

6. Business having low service quality average only a 1 percent return on sale and lose market share at the rate of 2 percent per year. Businesses with high service quality average a 12 percent return on sales, gain market share at the rate of 16 percent per year, and charge significantly higher prices.

7. A typical corporation loses half of its customers every five years. Yet by increasing the yearly customer retention rate by as little as five percent, companies can increase their bottom line profits from 25 to 100 percent.