by Erica Gardner

There are several ways to keep your customers on board with you for a very long time.  There are also several ways for you to lose customers.

Recently, we were working with a client to rebuild his website on a WordPress platform.  He was tired of the unresponsive service he was getting from his current web support team and wanted greater control over his web updates.

We make these conversions for existing websites on a regular basis, and have worked with a number of companies on the transition.  Most of my peers both locally, and around the country understand websites move on a regular basis, and make the transition as easy as possible.

Obviously,  The Computer Shop in Brownsburg, hasn’t learned this.  What should have taken an hour took several weeks to complete.  While we were annoyed, we began to understand why their client wanted to leave them as quickly as possible.

Here are just a few of the  reasons why they lost a valuable customer:

• Never answering the phone
• Never calling us back when a message was left
• Screening their calls so they wouldn’t have to talk to us
• Not giving us the correct information we needed

In the end, they lost a very client because of their poor customer service.  While they may not miss one client, when he, and the team at Roundpeg share our experiences, it is likely they will miss opportunities for other clients.

Seth Godin had an interesting post on a related topic, entitled, Win the Fight, Lose the Customer. In it he explains

“The customer is always right” doesn’t mean that they’d win in court or a debate. It means, “If you want the customer to remain a customer, you need to permit him to believe he’s right.”

I think this behavior should extend, when possible, even if you think you are going to lose the customer.  You never know, if down the road they may want to return or talk to a prospect about you.

Clearly, the Computer Shop in Brownsburg is so busy digging trenches, they will lose both the fight and the war.