You gain a customer, lose him, win him back or lose him completely. That is the business cycle, and that is the why for your customer relations system. In that cycle, it has been proven that winning back customers is far easier than gaining one.
However, your business focus shouldn’t be this alone. Rather, your business should devise a system that will tell you what your customers really need and want. Yet, you can’t do away with customers who go astray. There are many obvious reasons for that.
Let’s just say that you’re now on the task of winning back your customers. An article on iSixSigma says that you can use Six Sigma’s DMAIC for customer winback. Six Sigma being data driven and doing work by data gathering data, it can help you with the root-cause analysis of losing customers, in the first place. A root cause analysis starts with investigation. The Six Sigma methodology provides the structure as to how to understand the data gathered during investigation.
Based on the book Customer Winback: How to Recapture Lost Customers – and Keep Them Loyal by Jill Griffin and Michael W. Lowenstein, four steps have been identified as to how to go about the investigation. The article points where each step is in the DMAIC methodology. Here’s how it goes:
- Prepare: Determine what the organization knows and what is missing. (Six Sigma covers this within its Define phase.)
- Assemble: Identify unmet requirements, unheard complaints, priorities and areas of importance, and clearer insights. (Six Sigma addresses this portion in its Measure phase.)
- Comprehend: Having collected the information, determine with data models, regression, and statistical significance, areas that call for action and correction. (Six Sigma adds value during the Analyze phase.)
- Employ: Apply the conclusions to correct problems and improve quality and training. Expand support and resources, and establish recognitions and rewards to encourage member loyalty. (Six Sigma specifically targets this in the Improve and Control phases.)
Source:
iSixSigma, “Customer Winback Concept Begs for Use of Six Sigma,” with link provided by Promax Consulting.
