24 Nov 2025
Crisis conditions have forced companies to re-evaluate their plans and priorities. Planned investments aimed at growth (hiring, advertising) have been pushed to the background. We are forced into a fight for survival, where we must prioritize business elements that aid survival—we must focus on existing customers and, above all, ensure we lose as few of them as possible.
Shifting from a Growth Strategy to a Customer Retention Strategy
In times of crisis, it makes sense to reduce expenditures aimed at expansion and focus on retaining existing customers for a simple reason: it is easier and, more importantly, cheaper to sell to them than to new customers.
Philip Kotler long ago stated that it is 5 to 7 times easier to sell to existing customers than to new ones. On average, existing customers also spend 67% more than new customers. Working in your favor is the fact that during a crisis, buyers become more conservative; they spend less and primarily spend with companies they know and with whom they have had positive purchasing experiences. If you can maintain their trust, you will very likely be able to keep their business.
The fact is that all companies lose customers—some more, some less. The question is: do you know how many customers you are losing, why they left, and what you will do to prevent further attrition due to these issues?
Ask yourself how well you know your customers. How much do you communicate with them? Is the communication two-way? We are not talking about advertising messages, mass emails, or printed materials here. How much do you actually talk to them to figure out what you can do to increase their satisfaction?
Which of your employees do your customers speak with? Who is responsible for solving your customers' problems and addressing their wishes? Customers leave companies all the time. Do you know why? Did you do everything possible to keep that customer? Customer churn is always painful, but in times of crisis, it can be critical to a company’s very survival.
A portion of customers leave because they were unsatisfied with you. This is a problem, but simultaneously an opportunity to eliminate the cause of dissatisfaction and thereby prevent further customer churn.
Active listening tells you in real-time how satisfied your customers are with your products, services, and employees. Systematically measuring satisfaction is a key tool for understanding the steps you need to take to retain customers in the long run.
The core of an active satisfaction management strategy is customer feedback. This tells you what you need to do to ensure long-term customer satisfaction. Collecting feedback only makes sense if you consider the following:
1. The Right Time to Gather Information Every customer interaction is an opportunity to gather useful feedback. For example, an insurance company can collect feedback when a customer contacts an agent, when signing a policy, upon renewal, when filing a claim, or upon potential departure to a competitor. Each of these touchpoints is different, involves different employees, and involves different reasons for a potential departure.
2. The Right Questions Different interactions require different sets of questions to verify satisfaction. The purpose of collecting this data is to uncover potential reasons for churn at every touchpoint between the customer and your company.
3. Active Response Collecting feedback is pointless if you don't use it. If a customer has a negative experience in your store and tells you, but you don't react... Listening makes sense only if the company is dedicated to solving the problems customers highlight. This means having a person responsible for satisfaction management and problem-resolution processes. For instance, a customer complaining about a negative store experience (e.g., an unfriendly salesperson) could receive an email with a discount coupon and an apology.
The era of plenty is (at least for a while) over. Companies will be forced to optimize; we will have to do more with less resources, and growth strategies are giving way to a fight for survival. Companies that choose an active customer retention strategy will have higher chances of success. We retain customers most easily by listening to them, actively solving their problems and fulfilling their wishes, thereby ensuring an excellent purchasing and user experience.