Why do customers stop doing business with you?
Most of them won’t tell you. They leave silently, without a trace. For every scathing negative Yelp review from a dissatisfied customer, dozens more simply ghost you.
Although it’s difficult or impossible to determine why specific customers take their business elsewhere, it’s not hard to figure out the broad categories of reasons customers leave. Just think about why you’ve stopped shopping at a given store or making business purchases with a given supplier. It’s not always about price, is it? Price is only one factor in the overall customer experience, not always the most important one. Others include:
- Poor communication: Few things in life are as frustrating as trying to get a real person on the phone when you urgently need to resolve some issue. Something that might take days by email can be solved in minutes in an actual conversation. Still, some businesses shield their people behind layers of chatbots and telephone “integrated voice response” systems. Even in this modern age, the personal touch still counts for something.
- Lack of understanding or caring: Customers, particularly B2B customers, have essential problems to solve. A supplier or provider who makes no effort to understand the business problem and develop a reasonable solution will not have customers for long.
- General difficulty in doing business: If making a purchase or requesting a demo mires you in layers of red tape or inscrutable, poorly designed e-commerce sites, you will likely move on to someone easier to do business with.
Businesses that overcome these self-sabotaging limitations have a tremendous opportunity to gain market advantages against their competitors. And an essential piece of the puzzle is IT modernization.
Gaining Competitive Advantage with Modernization
Many of the issues described above can be partly blamed on outdated IT systems. A modernization program can reap significant benefits in competitive advantage. For example:
- A well-designed e-commerce or order status system, integrated with shipping carriers and other third-party systems, can provide up-to-the-minute inventory information, order status updates, expected delivery dates, and detailed account status information, among other things.
- A modern technical support system can help agents address and resolve product issues faster, streamline the returns process, and process more support calls with the same staffing level.
- Modern, cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) systems enable sales staff to organize their work better, stay in touch with their clients, and understand their pain points and business needs.
- For manufacturers, good manufacturing resource planning (MRP) tools and manufacturing execution systems (MESs) can help your teams optimize manufacturing operations, increase quality, and get the items into your customers’ hands more efficiently.
Of course, outdated IT systems may be only part of the problem. If you have business processes that seem as if they were deliberately designed to make it hard to communicate with customers or do business with them, those processes need to be fixed first. Otherwise, you will need more modernization to help you.
Solution Machine: A Trusted Modernization Partner
At Solution Machine, we understand that retaining an existing customer is easier and less expensive than gaining a new one. With extensive experience in IT modernization projects for clients across many industries, we know the role IT plays in optimizing customer retention and can help you design and execute a modernization roadmap tailored to your specific business needs.
Contact Solution Machine today to learn how we can help you gain a competitive advantage with an effective modernization initiative.