Sales are the driving force of nearly every business, with customers at the centre of their focus. With the current state of the market, having top-notch products alone is not enough to keep customers loyal to your brand. If aggressive customer acquisition methods are your only solution to one-time customers, your business may end up losing more than it gains.
The cost of acquiring new customers is five times more expensive than retaining their current ones. As a result, there has been a marked shift across industries to be more customer-focused and continuously improve customer experiences. Part of improving this experience is through excellent customer service and after-sales support.
This infographic will provide an overview of customer retention and strategies your business can explore to boost your practices.
8 Customer Retention Strategies You Should Adopt
Customer retention strategies can help bolster your company’s efforts to build a loyal customer base. These strategies aim to open communication with customers, anticipate their needs, and continuously provide them with effective solutions. Consider adopting the following strategies into your company best practices:
1. Actively listen to your customers
One of the most frustrating things that your customers experience is the feeling that brands do not value them. With 68% of customers leaving because they feel unappreciated, businesses need to pay close attention to their needs or risk losing them.
The best way to show your customers that you’re listening is through leveraging feedback tools. A well-timed customer survey can give you the insight you need to further improve your products and services.
You can also use pre-existing surveys like the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which focuses on customer loyalty and satisfaction. The NPS’s open-ended questions allow customers to go into details about issues, making it easier to pinpoint problems and address them.
2. Create a community for your customer base
Good products are your foot in the door with your target market, with 55.3% of consumers becoming brand converts because they love what you offer. However, you can further nurture this relationship through a user community.
Fostering a community for your loyal customers—either through community management or a curated space—helps bridge the gap between you and your customers, as well as connect loyal customers with each other.
With the right management and culture, the community can be a site for building a user-run knowledge base for helpful tips and tricks, user-submitted content and reviews, and seeking feedback for current and future offerings. This helps uplift your customers and increase customer retention.
3. Reach out before they churn
After a bad customer service experience, 20% of consumers will post on social media about the brand in question. This means that most of your customers will leave without saying a word, making it critical for you to reach them before they leave.
Getting to them early means you can help address any potential pain points while demonstrating how attentive your brand is to its customers. This means paying attention to potential actions, or a lack thereof, leading to churn.
Take advantage of CRM software to closely monitor your customers and their purchasing patterns. Create multiple lists of customers, sorted by their purchase activities. For those who haven’t purchased in half a year, personalised follow-up emails can help gain their feedback and talk them back into availing of your products.
4. Use targeted special offers
One of the challenges in customer retention is keeping some customers interested in your product—14% of customers may leave due to being unsatisfied with your product, and 9% may even prefer your competitor instead.
Using CRM software, you can gather the necessary information on purchase history and provide special offers to jumpstart their activity. Special offers are a great customer retention strategy, as they either resolve an issue the customer has or add value to the product with something that feels exclusive.
These special offers can be used in tandem with pre-churn follow-ups, winning back trust in your brand.
5. Communicate in the right channels
Nothing is more frustrating for customers than not being able to reach support when and where they need them the most. In this increasingly digital world, having only one channel for customer support just won’t cut it.
The numbers don’t lie: 68% of consumers are willing to interact via chat for customer support, with 90% of millennial consumers preferring to receive customer support through their smartphones. Meanwhile, consumers over age 55 have a stronger preference for landline-based services.
Going omnichannel through chatbots and other automated solutions can help speed up the process and keep the experience consistent yet helpful.
6. Reward your most profitable customers
Better than any marketing tactic, your loyal and most profitable customers are the best brand advocates you can ask for. Not only do 60% of loyal customers share their favourite brands with family and friends, but 40% of them are willing to spend more on their favourite brands’ products.
One of the best customer retention strategies for your loyal customers is a rewards program. Customers want to be valued for their business, and they should have something to show for it. Otherwise, they may feel ignored and take their business elsewhere. Your rewards program should add even more value to their overall experience and have an element of exclusivity to it.
Additionally, you can reward and incentivise their efforts to grow your customer base through a referral program. By recommending more people to your business, both you and your loyal customers stand to gain.
7. Personalise the customer experience
About 63% of U.S. consumers are willing to share more personal information with a company that provides a great customer experience. Generic messaging to customers can be off-putting and damper their impression of your brand.
From your marketing to customer support, you need to make your customers feel that each interaction is better tailored to their specific needs throughout the entire process. Use rich customer data and incorporate various segmenting strategies to create a consistent yet specific customer experience.
This customer retention strategy aims to remind your customers that their experiences are valuable to you.
8. Elevate your available information
A 2018 study from Forrester revealed that knowledge bases are the most frequently used self-service channel. Before you get a chance to communicate with them directly, your customers are already looking to you for ways they can help themselves.
Developing and sharing educational resources on your products and services is a good customer retention strategy for many reasons. Not only do easily-accessible resources empower customers to quickly resolve issues, but they also represent an extension of your overall customer support tactics.
Other ways you can further elevate these resources include onboarding tutorials, lifecycle emails that guide customers through learning to use products, and even offering one-on-one training sessions with your specialists.
Reach New Heights with the Right Customer Retention Strategies
At the core of every business is its customers. Providing an elevated customer experience brings with it a two-fold benefit: your customers are delighted by the value your brand brings to their lives, making them even more likely to stick with you and bring you more business.
Having a top-notch call centre partner is key to improving your customer support and retention strategies. Select VoiceCom is Australia’s premier call centre in the Philippines, offering professional call centre management services that can boost your business efforts. To learn more about our services, contact us today.