The Good Goodbye

The Good Business of a Good Customer Breakup

Country music knows a little something about bad breakups. No business wants to think about a customer leaving, but it is bound to happen. Good customer service includes how you treat customers after the transaction is complete. The end of the customer relationship is perhaps the most crucial test of customer service. A well planned goodbye is an investment in your brand and in your future revenue. So maybe taking the advice from the song above about breaking up is wise — never leave them with a bad goodbye.

This article is about why leaving your customers with a good goodbye is good for business illustrated by two case studies — recent experiences I had when cancelling services. The two companies had starkly different approaches to their departing customer (me). Because the interactions happened on the same day, they powerfully demonstrate the power of a well designed breakup.

Good goodbye

Back Story — For several years we enjoyed weekly lawn service from Scoop Soldiers. Their employees are always friendly and professional. They do their job well every week. As the result of some changes in our life, our need for the service ended.

Response — Like many companies, the user account flow allows direct signup online but requires cancellation through email to loop in personal contact. The responses I received from the company to my cancellation were friendly and professional, matching our experience with the brand. Rather than inquire about my reasons for cancelling, they sought insight into my experiences and opportunities for improvement. They thanked me for using their services and looked forward to my return to use them again providing a frictionless path back to restart services.

Outcome — Their good goodbye reinforced their brand and created a favorable final impression. In doing so they transitioned me from customer to ambassador. Like us, many of those within our sphere of influence are pet people who find home services providers through recommendations. Because of the well-designed goodbye process, we are likely to continue recommending their services even though we are no longer customers ourselves. In understanding the value of a good goodbye, Scoop Soldiers will be my preferred vendor when my family needs their services again. They gave me a respectful goodbye that left the door open for returning.

Bad goodbye

Back Story — For many years we had an annual subscription for home maintenance service with a company that I shall leave unnamed. Every few months, a technician would inspect our home systems (AC, plumbing, etc) for damage and perform preventive maintenance. Over time, the quality of the service decreased. Technicians shifted from friendly and courteous to pushy and “salesy.” Every visit required fending off high-pressure upsells. Worse, we no longer trusted their honesty. The service we purchased as a convenience had become a hassle. When our subscription expired, we chose not to renew.

Response — Six months after we cancelled, an appointment setter called to schedule a checkup. She was surprised to learn that we were no longer on a service plan. (Talk about an operational SNAFU!) In response, she transferred us to “customer service.” The customer service agent pushed us to renew with the same heavy-handed tactics that led us away from the company. When we explained that we switched to a competitor, they hung up on us!

Outcome — The impulse behind their terrible manners is easily understood: why waste time on a defector? Regardless everything about the way this company said good bye was poorly designed. Today, I find it very hard to imagine how they could win our business again. From an operational perspective, they squandered an opportunity to rehabilitate their legacy with a former customer leading to a missed opportunity to assess customer fit, sales strategy, and expectation setting. Either they had no mechanism in place to loop in direct contact when we did not renew or that mechanism failed. The story ends with a damaged reputation, lost revenue, and lost referrals.

The Take Aways

A good goodbye is good business because it supports brand management. Every savvy business leader knows that brand management extends well beyond logo and color scheme. Your brand is who you are and what you stand for. It is how you stand apart from your competitors. More importantly, it is how your customers (as well as your employees) ascribe personality to your company and understand their relationship with it. It’s the difference between whether your customers view you as cranky Uncle Ed who they must endure at holiday dinners because he’s family or as the friend they can call at 2 AM because she’ll stand by them no matter what the emergency.

A strong brand sets expectations for your customers and how you say goodbye underscores those expectations. Like it or not, goodbye is part of the customer journey. Even long-standing customer relationships end. Your final interaction with customers has staying power. No matter how well you have delivered for your customer in the past, recency bias means that how you say goodbye will play larger in their mind than previous interactions. Recency bias weights greater importance to more recent events than older ones. Realistically speaking, how they felt when their relationship ended with you will be the emotional brand that sticks with most of your customers and will determine how they interpret your messaging afterward. At the end of the relationship you set the memory of your business for the customer and, by extension, their sphere of influence. A good breakup process disposes them to a favorable impression of their experience with you.

A strong brand sets decision making parameters for your people. The Bad Goodbye described earlier reveals a business with no brand control. Their slide away from their service promise into consistently poor fulfillment typifies the consequences of poor brand management. Without the control of a clear personality, employees have no guardrails about how to do their job. The disconnect between what the customer expects and what they deliver serves no one. The Good Goodbye, on the other hand, presented every employee with the opportunity to make decisions from a place of deep understanding of what the company stood for and how it was meant to behave. Effective brand management meant employees met customer expectations because they knew what to deliver and how. Companies who prioritize brand management demonstrate how they value both customers and employees. Decisions are easier and more consistent, resulting in better operational flow and higher customer and employee satisfaction.

Many business and product owners that I know map out the customer journey with care and precision until they get to the customer’s exit from the business’ service or product. Then they focus on making it unpleasant to leave or they refuse to map it, rationalizing a just-in-time approach to “figuring it out” later. But the best business never take customer loyalty for granted. They understand that the interactions at the end of the relationship are just as critical to marketing and operations as the interactions at the beginning of the relationship. Goodbye must be a conscious part of brand management.

A key value of a good goodbye process is in its contribution to future revenue. Everybody loses customers. Understanding why you lost a customer is key to improving your odds for stabilizing or increasing future revenue. Goodbye is part of the customer journey and, thus, essential to modeling revenue. By incorporating goodbye into the customer journey, you can insulate the business from shock when revenue fluctuations occur. More importantly, you can leverage intelligence you glean from a good goodbye to make improvements throughout the organization that will delight more customers for longer.

A good goodbye offers an opportunity to determine if your marketing and sales aligns to your most enthusiastic customers. The information you glean from a well-designed goodbye process can tell you much about your product market fit by giving you immediate access to valuable, qualitative insight. A well-designed breakup does not demand an explanation from the customer about why they are departing, a pet peeve of mine because it implies the company is entitled to the customer who must satisfy some invisible litmus test to quit spending money there. In the Good Goodbye example, if my leaving was a matter of dissatisfaction, their well designed separation process provided an opportunity to probe expectations against experience and remedy the marketing, sales, or fulfillment processes causing dissatisfaction. The resulting intelligence from a good breakup let’s them distinguish between their ability to delight their target market and natural market fluctuations.

A good goodbye provides an unparalleled opportunity to surface operational issues. You may or may not be able to salvage the relationship with a departing customer, but the insight they provide and your willingness to move urgently to fix the issues may save unhappy customers on the fence about leaving. With the right product market fit, you know you have the solution to pain points; but you must also be able to fulfill the implicit and explicit sales promises you made to that key customer segment. If your operational issues are interfering with this ability, your goodbye process makes it easier to intervene effectively.

In the Bad Goodbye example, my annual subscription represented reliable income, with us happily paying a premium for service that fit the company’s schedule. The company lost six months in learning that we went to a competitor offering a similar service for a slightly higher price. Worse yet, their bad goodbye meant they never understood why. Even if we were not within their key target market (which seems unlikely to me), they missed an amazing opportunity to understand what the target market we represent would like from them were they to expand in the future. In losing this opportunity for early intel, they will undoubtedly find their costs higher later to acquire customers like me.

Happier customers have longer lifecycles, but there is always fluctuation even among the most enthusiastic customers. A good goodbye offers an opportunity to gauge changing market conditions that are impacting your key target market. Understanding the external pressure on your customers allows you to anticipate changes to revenue in order to empower your decision makers to move quickly and more effectively to protect your bottom line. Understanding these external factors will allow you to engage meaningfully with satisfied, but departed, customers to improve future reengagement or referrals to new customers.

A good goodbye is good business because it is an unparalleled opportunity for improvement. No one likes losing a customer, but in approaching this inevitable moment with an open heart you can learn much about the ways customers perceive the value offered by your products or services. It is natural to shy away from the difficult introspection these opportunities provide, but when balanced with other customer satisfaction data decision makers can approach every aspect of work more effectively to protect or to increase future revenue.

Summary

A customer journey that does not have a good exit strategy misses one of the central, inescapable truths of business: no business is entitled to customers. Every business exists to fill a need. For dozens of reasons, customer’s needs change. When those needs change, the business must respond appropriately — by leaving their customers with a good goodbye — to manage their brand and to improve their business opportunities.

Thanks for reading. Here’s wishing you a good goodbye!

¹ Full song lyrics and recording credit can be found here: https://genius.com/Clint-black-a-bad-goodbye-lyrics

Jennifer Columbe is the lead Operations Guru at Blue House Solutions. She blends her experience in operations, project management, product development to help business leaders build processes that work for their people.

She writes and speaks about issues impacting operations and building people centric businesses.

Reach out if you want to chat about how ideas in this article can work for your business.