In this exclusive podcast for Customer Management IQ’s call center audience, Joseph Jaffe, author of Flip the Funnel, explains how to reprioritize your loyal customers with common sense but far-too-often overlooked wisdom. To meet today’s pressure to acquire new customers, many companies and call centers pull out all the stops in order to woo a stranger to sample their wares. But it’s usually at the expense of the call center’s existing customers—the lifeblood of profits—who are far too important to ignore. The time has come to flip yesterday’s outdated marketing funnel. If you aim to grow business and shrink spending, the trick is to shift your call center’s focus from acquiring new customers to starting with your current customers. What once was the end is now the means, and retention has become the new acquisition.

With his trademark contrarian style, Jaffe cites real-life examples of call centers that have prospered from continually catering to the call center’s true believers such as Zappos, which transformed buying shoes into a WOW call center experience that sparked runaway word-of-mouth. Jaffe also sheds light on the successful customer-centric strategies of Southwest Airlines, Dell and other customer-focused leaders.

Acknowledge your call center’s customers, engage the call center’s customers in conversation and activate the call center’s customers so they can amplify positive buzz for your company more effectively and less expensively than any of your call center’s best salespeople could do. If you do, you’ll not just get short-term results. You’ll give your call center a new customer-centric ecosystem that is self-sustaining and incredibly valuable.