PAYDAY LOAN AUSTRALIA

According to the book, “Lessons from the Field” by Howard Feiertag and John Hogan, there are six reasons a company will loose a customer and that customer will never return. There are six reasons why a guest will leave your hotel and will not come back again, six categories we can place all of our truly lost business.

The six reasons are (1) death, (2) they move, (3) they make a new friend in the business, (4) they defect to a competitor, (5) they are dissatisfied with the product, or (6) they experienced an attitude of indifference from one or more employees.

In my seminars I give the attendees a list of the six reasons and ask them to make their best guess what percentage of total lost business applies to each of the six reasons. After a few minutes of discussion I reveal the actual percentages. It is always a surprise when I give them the real numbers.

Almost everybody is too high on the low ones and too low on the highest. Try to guess for yourself. What do you think the percentage of lost business is because the customer dies? What about moving? And make a friend in the business? And defect to a competitor? And how much are dissatisfied with the product? And what percentage leaves because of employee attitude? We will cover each, one at a time.

Six Reasons They Will Not Return

Death - Yes, it is sad, but it is a part of life and a part of business. Guests do die from time to time and will not be coming back to our hotels. Pull yourself together, we must move on. (1%)

Move - Our guests may move to another city and just don’t need to use our hotel any more. Life changes may be a factor, job transfers, any number of things can affect our guest that moves out of their region and won’t be returning to our hotel. (3%)

Make a new friend in the business - Once in a while as people live their lives and meet new people the make friends. Sometimes these new friends will be in the same business that we are in. Often times in this situation the new friend will give a discount or just compel the guest to switch hotels. (5%)

Defect to competitor - The advertising of our competition can once in a while get through to our customers, or a new hotel might open nearby, causing our guests to try them and possibly defect. (9%)

Product dissatisfaction - No matter how hard we try, no matter how much we research and redesign our hotels, there will be people who just don’t like something about the buildings we built. Some design element or some quirk about the layout of the hotel itself will put some people off. Human nature has various likes and dislikes. We can’t please all of the people all of the time with our product. (14%)

Employee attitude of indifference - Up to this point all of the reasons for lost business are things out of our control. This one is completely within our control. The attitude we display and the attitude our employees project, make a big difference to guest satisfaction. When a guest feels that the employee is indifferent, or simply doesn’t care, about a request or a guest issue, the guest will leave without any intention to return to our hotel. Now here is the big surprise… the percentage of customers who leave for this reason is 68%.

Bear in mind that many of these unhappy guests will tell others about the situation and the experience becomes a story to tell at parties. On the average, dissatisfied guests will tell eight to ten other people about the less than acceptable experience. One out of five of these will tell about 20 people. The attitude we show is what will save our business.

by Will Maguire

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 8th, 2007 at 1:42 am and is filed under Business . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.