The cost of missed connections from existing customers

This article originally appeared on Forbes Business Council.

Every year, companies pour billions into getting customers to talk to them.

Ads, sponsorships, PR campaigns, content programs—the list goes on. And every year, the spend increases. Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) research projects that U.S. ad spend will grow by 9.5% this year, with digital ad spend leading the growth.​​

Here’s the troubling part. Every check the marketing team writes has one underlying goal: Get a customer or prospect to pay attention to us. To raise their hand. To start a conversation.

But once they're a customer, it's the opposite. It should be easy. They already know us. They're already using our product. They've already said yes.

And yet when they call, we do everything in our power not to talk to them.

Of course, no executive gets on stage and announces, "This year, our strategy is to spend $40 million generating demand and then force those people into a phone tree that tells them to check the FAQ." But that's exactly what's happening. We've built an entire discipline around "call deflection."

I want to talk about what that's costing us. Not the operational cost of handling calls, but the other costs nobody's calculating.

Existing customers are the leaky bucket.

A customer calls because they have a problem, a question or a need. Maybe they're trying to change a flight and, while they have you on the line, would happily book another upcoming trip. Maybe they have a question about a charge on their bank statement and, once reassured, would be open to hearing about a new product.​

Many companies consider inbound calls an inefficiency to be engineered away. The goal becomes deflection. Get them to self-serve. Get them off the phone.

The problem is that customers push back. Hard. According to ContactBabel's 2024 U.S. Contact Center Decision-Makers' Guide, 32% of calls that enter telephony self-service are "zeroed out," meaning callers abandon the automated system entirely to reach a human. And when contact center operators were asked why, 76% said the main reason is that self-service doesn't offer what customers want.

They came in wanting to connect. We made it hard. They pressed 0, and the clock started on how much patience they have left.

Meanwhile, travel companies are focusing on retargeting ads to win back lapsed bookers. Banks are running campaigns to cross-sell products to existing account holders. Every dollar of it is aimed at customers who are already trying to reach them.​

Voice is your highest-converting channel.

When a customer calls, they are more ready to act than at almost any other touchpoint. They've already taken the initiative to engage.

A TransUnion survey of 1,556 U.S. adults found that consumers disproportionately prefer the phone for the moments that matter most: 55% for high-value decisions, 55% for urgent circumstances, 64% for personal situations like healthcare and 40% for complex decisions.

Those are the exact conversations that determine whether a customer stays, expands or leaves.

Think about your own life. You pick up the phone for something trivial. You call when you have a real issue, you need a real answer and the stakes are high enough that you want to talk to a person. Your customers are the same. And the customer who calls with high stakes and gets a great experience doesn't just stay, they buy more, they refer others and they stick around.

The customer who calls and gets routed through three automated menus and never reaches a human? They remember, too.

Loyalty is the business model, and we're sabotaging it.

There's a reason customer acquisition costs have been skyrocketing, and it's not just inflation.

Customer acquisition is expensive because it's hard. It requires attention, trust-building, proof points and time. When you finally win a customer, the economics of keeping them and growing them are dramatically better than going out to find a new one.

Which means the entire business model depends on loyalty. On customers who stay, expand and advocate. And loyalty doesn't happen because your product does what you said it would. It happens because customers feel taken care of. Because when they needed something, you showed up.

Every missed connection is a small withdrawal. The customer who couldn't get through. The one who gave up after holding for 11 minutes. The one whose problem got resolved correctly but coldly, with zero warmth and no acknowledgment that their frustration was valid.

They're loyalty failures, and, in turn, revenue failures.

Real ROI accounts for missed connections.

Marketers spend a lot of time calculating the cost of delivering customer service. Headcount per ticket. Cost per call. Deflection rate. These are real metrics that matter. Operational efficiency is important.

But I want to challenge the assumption underneath them.

The assumption is that a call handled is a cost incurred. What if we ran the math the other way? What if we looked at calls deflected as revenue not captured? What if we calculated the lifetime value of the customers who called, didn't get what they needed and decided not to renew?

The cost of the connection is not the call center agent's time. The cost of the missed connection is the customer who left.

When you look at it that way, you'll likely realize that you're already spending the marketing dollars. You're already paying to generate the demand. The customer showed up. The only thing left to decide is whether you're going to be ready for them.​​