One Way to Not Retain Customers

After using a company for a service, their sales team noticed what I had done and suggested I use their service the next time, pointing out all the benefits that made my decision to use them in the first place.  After replying with the details, they respond again with all the advantages of their service.  Now I will probably look elsewhere and their sales representative may not be having his best day today.

This is not the first time this has happened. In a previous job, some years ago, I outsourced the company's web design. A few months after it was completed a sales representative from that company emailed me to see if would let him critique our website with him in a teleconference. So I let him. After he had been through it and suggested areas for improvement and where "our designers" could have done a better job I let him know his company was responsible for it. He was rather embarrassed, but I think he then went on to improve his sales approach.

There is plenty of customer relationship management software out there (Salesforce as an obvious example) to prevent this from happening. Do not turn your happy customers into customers that think you are incompetent and do not want to use you again.

Oh and why did I let the web company critique their own work? Was it for sadistic fun? No, it was to hammer home the point of knowing your customers first and foremost.