Have you heard the news about Sprint firing some of its more "troublesome" customers? They said they were going to terminate their relationship with approximately 1000 customers that they thought were draining their customer service department with repeated calls. They claim 40-50 calls per month were coming into their customer service department from each of these 1000 customers.
If you keep up with my blog posts, which I hope you do! Then you saw my post about firing your difficult clients. It is good business to weed through your customer base at least once a year and get rid of any customers that are costing you money and/or time. Check out my friend Tom Taulli's post about Firing your customers, because sometimes their business is just not worth it!
I would like to share some things you can do to help you prevent having to fire any customers or to help you make a decision on who to fire.
Preventing troubled customers is as easy as “screening” them BEFORE they become a customer. You interview and research your employees; you should do the same with customers. If you are extending credit you are checking credit references, job information, bank information and things that will determine if this person is credit worthy. If they are not credit worthy, you don’t extend credit. No one wants a customer that is going to cause trouble and a non-paying customer or a late paying customer is trouble for you and your business.If you didn’t interview, or screen your customer and just accepted them as a customer and now they are giving you trouble, you have to remember that once a year you need to go through all of your customers and fire the trouble customers. These are the customers that cost you money, don’t make you money, waste your time or waste your employees’ time. You want to spend your time with customers who are not trouble and that make you money. When I work with business owners I tell them that each year when they “fire’ their top 5 or top 10 “trouble” customers, a good way to fire them is to tell them that since you cannot provide the extent of service that they need or require it will be better if they go somewhere else where their needs can be met. This way, you are not burning any bridges and you are being honest without going into detail about how this customer may drain your time, and cause you stress with their troubles.
Every successful business should do this because the goal is to have happy customers that tell their friends about your business and pay you on time!
» What are you, a Bank? from BizCreditPolicy
If your customer’s owe you money you are lending them more money than you realize!The November issue of Inc. Magazine has a great article in this month by Norm Brodsky where he talks about your customers taking to long... [Read More]
Tracked on: November 20, 2007 5:51 AM | Permalink to Trackback