[URGENT] Marketing works hard to acquire customers, but our backend is leaking them. This is not good

TO: All Marketing Team Members, Customer Service, Operations

CC: Management, CEO

FROM: Azleen Abdul Rahim, CMO

SUBJECT: [URGENT] Marketing works hard to acquire customers, but our backend is leaking them. This is not good.

Good day everyone,

Azleen here. I have some not-so-good news here with me to share with all of you. This month alone, 2 companies decided not to renew our contract after 5 years. This may not be significant to us as the amount is relatively small, but I take all customer-leaving situations seriously. When customers who have been with us for half a decade decide to walk away, it means we are getting complacent. While our marketing team, our management team and the sales team are pouring everything they have into securing new customers month-in-month-out, we didn't even realise that our backend seems to be leaking.

This is not good. Filling up the funnel is completely pointless if our backend is leaking it.

Please understand one thing about retention. It is more than just a random customer satisfaction. It is an operational discipline. If we want to earn the first right of refusal every time a customer wants our products, services or even to scale, our retention processes must run efficiently. It seems that our customer-first and personnel-first policies and mottos all around aren't working.

I need to enforce a change to plug this leak. Here's what I want us to do.

First, the Marketing team will introduce the online customer satisfaction survey. Yes, this is going to be our feedback acquisition tool. We are deploying this via 2 methods. One, it will be periodically, as in every quarter. And two, it will also be right after the response or problems solved when customers initiate a call for support. This online survey will be executed by the Customer Service and Operations team. Right now, many conversations stay trapped in everybody's personal WhatsApp chats. This must stop today. Centralise all conversations with customers using our CRM and website's real-time chat feature, so that each response will be fast and effective. FYI, these are data we are talking about here and not just conversations. Now, if a customer faces an issue with our delivery, Operations must route it straight to the Product and Content teams so we can fix the root cause before it becomes a nightmare.

Second, the Marketing team will draft a concrete loyalty program. Please benchmark relevant brands out there, understand their mechanisms well and draft an idea. In general, we must offer either a direct perk, such as special treatment, discounts, rebates, or redeemable points, to our existing customers to remind them that their loyalty carries commercial value, or we can offer indirect or in-kind perks. I don't have a good example for these indirect perks, and you need to figure it out yourself. Propose a few options. This is one of many ways to make them stay with us.

Third, the Operations and Customer Service teams must raise the baseline of your communication level with the customers. We need to improve the quality of our communication with end-customers, business partners, and affiliates regularly. More frequent and more subtle ways to elevate trust. We cannot leave relationship management to luck. We need a defined, consistent workflow where everyone in our ecosystem, from the direct customer to our referral network, is engaged and kept in the loop dynamically.

When we talk about customers, Marketing brings them to the table. It's Customer Service and Operations tasks to keep them there. Losing accounts after 5 years is not-so-good news to us, however, we still have time to improve ourselves. a wake-up call. I expect every Head of Department here to audit your retention SOPs immediately and align them with these steps.

Please, clean the house based on my suggestion above. I'm available this week in the office for a discussion if you need one.

Azleen

P.S. Thanks for reading. If you want a functional marketing team that produces results, we can help you build it. Let's talk.