Who in your company owns the customer after the first sale

Every business has someone who owns new customers: sales, ads, the front desk. Almost none has someone who owns them after the first purchase. Until you name that person, returning customers are everyone's job and so nobody's.

Who owns the customer after the first sale?

In most small companies, nobody. The owner remembers a few regulars. The front desk greets them. A marketer sends a newsletter. Each of these touches the customer now and then, but no one is responsible for the question that matters: who has stopped coming, and what are we doing about it?

I saw the alternative when I built retention software for online casinos. In a casino the person who owns that question has a title: CRM manager. Their job is to decide, every day, who hears from the business, who gets a personal call, and who is better left alone.

I am telling you about casinos because the role is very clear there, and the lessons carry over to a clinic, a shop or a studio.

What does a CRM manager actually do?

I expected something technical. What surprised me was how ordinary the work is.

They look at one list most of the time: customers who used to come regularly and stopped. They decide what to say to each kind of customer. A person who is a few days late gets a light reminder. A person who has been quiet for months gets something different, and a few get a real conversation.

They also decide who must not be contacted. Casinos have strict rules about this, for example players who excluded themselves from gambling. A good CRM manager treats those rules as the first filter, before any thought of an offer. In your business the same filter covers customers who asked you to stop, who unsubscribed, or who never gave you permission for a channel.

Then, over the following weeks, they check whether the people they contacted came back more often than similar people they did not contact. Without this step the job turns into sending messages and hoping.

If you want to see what a day looks like in software built for it, what is a retention CRM walks through it for casinos. The screens differ by industry. The questions do not.

Do I need to hire one?

No. A clinic or a shop does not need a new employee for this. It needs to give the job to someone by name, and to protect a few hours a week for it.

The person can be you. Many owners start there and it works. The risk is that an owner's week is full of urgent things, and returning customers are never urgent until the revenue drops. If you do it yourself, put the time in the calendar like an appointment with a client.

If you delegate, pick someone who knows the customers by name and has the patience to look at a list. Front-desk staff are often good at this. They already know who comes in and who stopped.

What should that person be able to decide?

Three things, and it helps to write them down.

• Who gets contacted this week, from the list of customers who are due or late.
• What they are told, within a few approved messages.
• Whether a customer gets an offer, up to a limit you set.

The last one needs a limit because an offer is a cost. If the person can give any discount to anyone, the discounts will creep up, since a discount is the easiest way to feel that you did something. Part 6 of this series covers who approves discounts and how often to meet. For now, agree on a ceiling and on who to ask above it.

How do you know the person is doing it well?

Do not count messages sent. Ask three questions each month.

1. Of the customers who were due, how many did we reach?
2. Of those we reached, how many came back?
3. Did they come back more often than similar customers we did not contact?

The third one is the hard one, and I give it its own part of the series. The short version is that you leave a random tenth of the list alone and compare. It feels strange to deliberately not contact someone. It is the only way to know whether the work earns its keep.

What if nobody has time?

Then look at the cost the other way round. Say your regulars bring in $10,000 a month and you lose a tenth of them each quarter without noticing. That is a thousand dollars a month of regular revenue gone every quarter, and you replace it with ad spend. A few hours a week is cheap by comparison. These are example numbers, so put in your own.

A small, protected block of time beats a big plan. One afternoon a week, same day, same list, same person.

What can you do today?

Write one name next to the words "returning customers". Put it in a document your team can see. If you can write a name, schedule the first afternoon in the next seven days and tell that person what the first list is: customers who were due in the last month and have not been back.

If you cannot write a name, you have found the gap. That is a useful thing to find, and it costs nothing to fix.