In today’s competitive business landscape, customer retention is more critical than ever. Retaining existing customers is a cost-effective way to grow your business and create long-term success.
With the average cost of new customer acquisition on the rise, it’s crucial to focus on keeping your existing customers happy and loyal. But how can you ensure that your customers keep coming back for more?
In this blog, we will explore five practical steps to boost customer retention and generate opportunities for growth within your business. By implementing these strategies, you can create a positive customer experience, enhance loyalty, and drive long-term business success.
1. Create a Customer Success Team
Keeping your customers happy is so fundamental that it will undoubtedly pay to have
a dedicated team who leads the way in ensuring that Customer Experience lies at the
heart of your operations.
It also sends out a clear message that you are proactive in caring about your
customers, making sure that their expectations are met and that they get the best
results from your products or services. To put it another way – customers want to feel
loved! When asked for the reasons they feel a strong emotional connection to a
particular brand, 65% of US consumers recently said it is because they feel as if the
company cares about people like them.
2. Maximize Opportunities For Feedback
The adage about not relying on assumptions applies to customer retention as much
as acquisition. Don’t be fooled into thinking you know what it is your customer expects
or needs in their ongoing relationship with you. Aim to give them regular opportunities
to feed back on all aspects of your delivery, from onboarding to the product itself to
overall satisfaction and experience.
Customer satisfaction surveys certainly retain a role in retention marketing, but this
doesn’t have to be restricted to a formal (possibly annual) mass send-out. You can
ask customers to complete ad-hoc surveys after any engagement exercise, such as a
webinar. Immediate, activity-specific feedback like this can be immensely useful to
help you tweak your approach mid-campaign. Consider getting loyal customers
involved in focus groups – and don’t underestimate the value of timely and concise
email updates, blogs – like this one! – and engaging with customers on social media.
In essence, aim to keep the dialogue going at all points in the customer journey so
that you are equipped with the insight you need to make informed decisions about
future retention activity and make your customers feel valued at the same time.
3. Value Reviews For Deeper Understanding
As you will read in our Customer Success blog I referred to above, Value Reviews
form a key element of best practice retention strategy, not only to gauge satisfaction
levels but to check that your customers are reaping maximum benefit from your
services – and to support them in doing so. This really helps build trust and loyalty
from a relationship perspective, not to mention the practical matter of embedding your
services deeper within their company.
We’ve found that these in-depth reviews – which can be undertaken by phone or face
to face – tend to surface new areas for growth and development for both our business
and our customers’.
4. Educate And Advise
Today’s consumers are masters in self-education. Between 60% and 90% of the
buyer’s journey is now self-guided, and both Forrester and Gartner have predicted that
80% of the buying process will take place without any direct human-to-human
interaction by 2020. You can try to exploit this trend by ensuring there are plenty of
opportunities for customer-based learning on all your communication channels. For
example, providing webinars, videos, online user guides and even case studies can
further customers’ understanding of how your services can be adopted and extended,
helping you to create more valuable and stronger relationships.
5. Create A Customer-Centric Culture
This last step essentially joins all the others together to establish a coherent path to
customer satisfaction and loyalty across your whole organization. Everyone within
your business (not just those in customer-facing roles) needs to understand their
contribution and impact on your customers’ experience. Fostering a positive, forward looking, customer-centric culture may require training to secure buy-in from all teams.
To End it Off
Customer retention is crucial for the growth and success of your business. By implementing a dedicated customer success team, maximizing opportunities for feedback, valuing reviews for deeper understanding, educating and advising your customers, and creating a customer-centric culture, you can improve the overall customer experience, enhance loyalty, and generate opportunities for growth.
It is essential to keep the dialogue going, listen to your customers, and implement changes based on their feedback. By prioritizing customer retention, you can reduce costs associated with customer acquisition and drive long-term business success.