CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FINAL THOUGHTS
There’s no one simple answer to the complex challenge of attracting and retaining customers. Implementation is also not easy. But the rewards are significant. According to the Strategic Planning Institute of Cambridge, Massachusetts, offering service that is focused on caring for customers results in customers staying up to 50 percent longer, which, in turn, reduces marketing costs by between 20 and 40 percent and ultimately leads to better net returns of between 7 and 17 percent.1
Ultimately, an organization that is successful at customer retention is successful at what Peter Drucker, whom we quoted earlier in this text, wrote almost fifty years ago: “The purpose of a business is to create a customer.”2 A “created” customer is one that not only has been won but also has been retained. To emphasize this point one final time in concrete dollar terms, a Towers and Perrin survey reports that in the insurance business, increasing customer retention by just 2 percent can add approximately $60 million of value to an agency with a billion dollars in current premium levels.3 These are bottom-line assets asking for a home. We have no doubt that adding emotional value can easily increase customer retention by this 2 percent.246
If staff are to “create” customers in the service/experience economy, they require a level of emotional sophistication not widely found or supported in the modern world. In order for organizations to meet this challenge, they cannot expect that old approaches will bring success in the changed environment. At the same time, they do not need to completely reinvent themselves. The process of human development is a gradual one. As long as organizations commit themselves to incorporating the emotional aspect of their work into their structures, systems, policies, and procedures, they will have taken that first step toward adding emotional value to the workplace, to staff, and ultimately to customers.