“Customers do not grow on trees!” This old tenet is more valid today than ever in oftentimes saturated markets. On the one hand, customers and the potential associated with them cannot be increased as you like, on the other hand, the acquisition of new customers costs a company a multiple of what has to be invested to retain customer loyalty.
Another important aspect is often neglected: A dissatisfied customer usually tells about 5 to 7 times as many people in his direct environment a satisfied one does – the loss of image is therefore immense. Of course, this applies even more to customers who have quit. But what are at the end of the day the reasons why a customer changes his provider and which customers (types) have which different reasons for becoming ex-customers?
With the ex-customer-survey you receive the necessary answers to this crucial question and thus the possibility of not giving up the quitting of high-potential customers or of recapturing them for your company through targeted customer recovery management.
- The CUSTOR ex-customer survey provides you with valuable information about your ex-customers’ reasons for their termination.
- So called “soft” factors (e.g. customer preferences, expectations) are as well taken into account as “hard” factors like product quality, price, etc.
- Thanks to the self-explanatory presentation of the results, you can concentrate on the essentials: on the implementation of these insights to thus no longer giving your customers reason to quit.
CUSTOR’s survey of quitting customers provides you with the following content in particular:
- customer expectations of your company
- customer expectations of your products and services
- customer satisfaction
- customer loyalty and its determinants
- reasons for choosing the company
- product usage (last)
- reasons for the change
- evaluation of advice and service (contact person, initiative, opening times, access routes, etc.)
- company image (total & partial dimensions)
- statistics / socio-demographics
The questionnaire is always developed in close cooperation with the client so that there is enough room for company-specific questions.
In order to give ex-customers the opportunity to express themselves freely and without possibly perceived social pressure by an interviewer, these surveys are in most cases carried out online.
In exceptional cases – such as with b2b surveys – telephone or even personal interviews can also be used.
Usually, the completed interviews will be collected and evaluated for periods of time.
Regarding ex-customer surveys, there is usually no sampling; normally all customers who quitted in the respective period of time are invited to take part in the survey.
However, CUSTOR recommends not to fall short of a subgroup size of 100 participants either, as there is a considerable loss of statistical quality below this limit.
- methodical consultation, study design and project management
- questionnaire development, programming and pretest
- recruitment of the respondents
- organization of fieldwork
- interviews and field control
- coding of open ends
- computer-aided data analysis
- delivery of tables in CUSTOR format
- chart report (about 40 pages) containing management summary and prioritized recommendations for action
- presentation of the results to the client