Act now before you lose your most valuable customer

Somewhere between the ad that first caught their eye and the moment they could have clicked to finalise their payment, you likely lost a customer. Not to a competitor or the economy, but to your own customer journey.

Individually, these moments might seem insignificant: a slow page load, an extra form field, a delivery cost that appears too late. But across thousands or millions of customer journeys, they can add up to a sizeable amount of lost revenue.

The costliest losses, though, are not always the most visible. Some customers do not abandon their basket or complain. They buy less than they might have, choose the safer but lower-value option, fail to get the result they expected, or simply do not return.

It’s a growing problem for UK businesses, and it’s easy to see why. Markets are saturated, products and brands are becoming more alike, and the old approach of spending more to win more customers is no longer working.

According to McKinsey, only one in eight of the world’s 5,000 largest companies managed to grow revenue by more than 10% a year over the past decade.

For most, real growth is not only coming from finding new customers. It is also coming from making more of the demand they have already worked and paid to create: stopping customers from slipping through the cracks, and ensuring that those who do buy realise enough value to choose again.

There are a few reasons why this has become more pressing.

One is that there is less room to simply put prices up. In categories such as telecoms, cars or clothing, customers have already hit the limit on what they are willing to pay, so growth cannot simply come from charging more. And there is a natural limit on the other side too: there are only so many cars, jumpers or tins of paint any one person needs.

Then there is the fact that switching to a competitor has never been easier. Digital advertising has made it cheaper and simpler for new competitors to reach a business’s existing customers, while online shopping has made it easy for consumers to compare brands, prices and reviews. EY’s 2025 Future Consumer Index found that value is now twice as influential as brand when it comes to UK purchase decisions, with more than 40% of shoppers switching to own-label or cheaper alternatives. Customer loyalty can no longer be taken for granted; it must be earned at every stage of the journey.

Perhaps most importantly, customer experience itself has been perceived as getting worse. The Institute of Customer Service’s UK Customer Satisfaction Index fell for three consecutive readings into early 2024, hitting its lowest point since 2015. That decline came just as customer expectations were rising, and brands such as John Lewis and Amazon, with their quick refunds and helpful AI support, were raising the bar for what good service looks like.

Together, these forces mean recruiting new customers has never been more expensive relative to the payoff; keeping, converting and growing the value of the ones already in your funnel has never mattered more.

Consider an ordinary online purchase. Someone sees a brand on Instagram and clicks through to the website. Once there, they might be forced to register an account before they can buy, or cannot find what they want. Maybe they do add something to their cart, but then delivery is too expensive or their preferred payment method is unavailable.

This is not a marginal problem. Baymard’s ongoing research puts average global online-shopping cart abandonment at around 70%. Meanwhile, research from Publicis Sapient found that 59% of UK consumers would switch to another brand after an unsatisfactory digital commerce experience.

These are the visible leaks: the ones a web analytics dashboard is relatively well equipped to show. But the more valuable leaks can be harder to spot. They tend to happen between channels and stages of the journey, when a customer has intent, but not enough confidence; when they purchase, but do not understand the full value available to them; or when the experience fails to deliver the outcome that makes the original choice feel worthwhile.

For example, using publicly available data on paint brand Farrow & Ball, Initials’ model identified a potential leak that had nothing to do with advertising spend or a lack of customer interest.

Customers may be willing to pay around £50 for a tin of premium paint, but then apply it with a cheap brush because nothing at the point of purchase makes the right equipment easy or compelling to add. Using publicly available category and retail data, Initials modelled an indicative accessory opportunity of £800,000 to £1m annually.

The point is not that Farrow & Ball needs a different brand or lower prices. The brand has already created willingness to pay. The opportunity lies in ensuring the experience supports the premium outcome the customer expected, and captures the value associated with it.

That is a different category of growth problem. The initial sale may still happen, so it does not necessarily show up as a conventional conversion failure. But the business loses basket value, weakens the product experience and risks compromising future loyalty in the process.

Turning things around does not necessarily require a massive data set. A decent category benchmark, some internal sales figures or solid consumer research can be enough to start seeing where value is being lost. Most mid-sized UK businesses already have more of this information than they use, but it is often spread across different systems, rather than being connected to what is happening at each stage of the customer journey.

The task is not to collect more data, but to connect commercial signals with customer behaviour: to understand which moments in the journey affect confidence, conversion, basket value, successful use, repeat purchase and advocacy, and to put a value on improving them.

That is the thinking behind what we call Growth Engineering: identifying the points at which valuable customer demand fails to become realised commercial value, before deciding whether the answer is better brand communication, product information, service design, digital experience, retail execution or something else entirely.

At a time when new customers are expensive to win and existing ones are easier to lose, growth does not always mean spending more or finding a new audience.

It means recognising that every moment in the customer journey can either create value or lose it.

Josh Tilley is strategy director at Initials CX