The Frugal Wow
What do a chicken sandwich, a mop, and a 3-year-old have to do with customer retention at your shop? Hello? I’m surprised you don’t see the connection already, but here it is…
Fred Reichheld, customer-retention expert extraordinaire and author of The Loyalty Effect and Loyalty Rules, wrote about the “frugal wow.” Chick-fil-A, a fast food chain with an incredible customer service ethic, had come up in conversation with a colleague, who told Reichheld that his family visits Chick-fil-A about once a week… because of their 3-year-old and one employee practicing a “frugal wow.”
A man named Jose mops the floor with a large sweeper. During one of the family’s visits, Jose started talking with the 3-year-old and asked – with a wink to the parents – for the child’s help with his mopping. So the young son stood on the mop, Jose pushed him around the restaurant for a few minutes, and, ever since, every week, the little boy presses the family to go back to Chick-Fil-A.
Talk about retention attention! One person’s no-cost interaction with a customer has yielded the payout of one family’s return week after week. That’s the principal of the frugal wow.
Obviously, as a home service contractor, your situation is different. You can’t let three-year-olds ride in your truck or show them how electricity works or why plumbing is so messy. But everyone in your company has the tools (and budget) to offer a frugal wow. A service job that comes in under the estimate? That’d be amazing. A dispatcher that calls to ask if the tech can come ten minutes early? Offering to roll the garbage can back from the street? Whatever it may be, look for frugal ways to add value to your customer’s experience, and you’re taking a big step toward the customer’s retention.
As Riechheld’s studies show, customer retention adds up: businesses with as little as a 5% increase in their customer retention rate can increase profits by anywhere from 5% to 95%. And acquiring a new customer can cost 6 to 7 times more than retaining an existing customer.