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Salespeople have a reputation for bringing in new customers then letting someone else in the company worry about keeping them around for repeat business. That may be true in some cases, but savvy sales professionals are also great relationship builders -- they know firsthand that it's easier to keep and sell to an existing client than to acquire a new one. Their efforts may not be enough.

Companies that pay more than lip service to being customer centric should have as formal a process for retaining customers as they do for acquiring them. And it should be enterprisewide, not just left to sales or marketing alone.

Earlier this week I attended Frost & Sullivan's Sales & Marketing Executive MindXchange, during which Purdue’s Mike Trotter posed this question: If you don't have a retention strategy that's budgeted and documented, are you really customer centric? Trotter, the executive director of the university’s Center for Customer-Driven Quality, emphasized the importance of having set processes and a dedicated budget, as well as metrics to show results.

He also noted that "customer centricity is a convergence of all company resources on the customer" and the customer experience. In other words, your retention strategy must extend beyond the contact center and sales and marketing departments into such areas as HR, finance, and IT. Consequently, there should also be metrics that show customer focus in each of those areas. It sounds difficult to do, but consider this question as one form of measurement: When was the last time you changed a process or policy based on customer input? Or this: Do you ask customers why they leave? (Perhaps it was a billing issue or a problem with your Web site, not a bad experience in the call center or with the product.)

Being customer centric -- and having a documented retention strategy -- Trotter explained, also means having a proactive approach to engaging, listening to, and responding to customers. Do you have a formalized, proactive retention strategy that extends throughout your organization? Why or why not?