Businesses usually give little thought to their customer retention strategies until they start losing customers says Saivian. By then, it’s often too late to make any major changes. Most companies are constantly looking to upgrade their employees’ skills and increase productivity, but customer retention fidelity should be a top priority as well.
Gather customer feedback. First, you must gather information about your customers’ experiences and needs. Use call center representatives for this task to ensure that the information is accurate and consistent. Calls can also be recorded so there’s no question as to what was said by whom.
Step 1:
Identify the triggers that encourage customers to do business with you in the first place and understand what is important to them when choosing a supplier or service provider.
All businesses should conduct some type of market research before starting up, but customer research has to be an ongoing process so you can learn about your customers’ changing needs.
Step 2:
Establish the metrics that define success for your retention strategies and develop customer profiles so you know who to target, who not to target, and what their expectations are.
Saivian says customer profiling is essential if you want to retain customers because it means you can measure the performance of your strategy and focus on what really matters.
Step 3:
Build a strong relationship with customers so they will listen to you when it comes to any requests or complaints.
Getting Customers’ Attention:
You have to build and maintain an emotional connection with your customers before customer retention strategies become viable, so get out of the office and get to know your customers face-to-face.
Step 4:
Set measurable, achievable goals for customer retention strategies and monitor progress regularly so you can refine the strategy if necessary.
Saivian says businesses don’t run successful customer retention strategies without monitoring how they are performing, so make sure you build reporting mechanisms into your customer retention strategy.
Step 5:
Identify the causes and patterns of customer attrition and be aware that some customers will walk away from your business without you knowing why.
Customer attrition is inevitable, so businesses should set up processes to identify when customers leave so they can pick up the phone or send an email and ask them why they left.
Step 6:
Develop a range of retention strategies and offer the right service to the right customer at the right time.
Customer Retention Strategies:
There is never one silver bullet when it comes to customer retention, so businesses should develop and implement a number of different strategies that meet their customers’ evolving needs.
Step 7:
Don’t assume customers know what to expect from you.
You have to communicate your retention strategy so customers understand how, when and why they will benefit from doing business with you.
Step 8:
Learn from the experience because customer attrition is a fact of life in every industry.
Saivian says the most successful customer retention strategy is the one that works best for your business, so businesses need to analyze what is causing customers attrition and develop retention strategies accordingly.
1. Businesses usually give little thought to their customer retention strategies until they start losing customers or a customer retention specialist comes on the scene.
2. Customer attrition is defined as any situation in which a current customer decides to stop doing business with your company and go elsewhere, so businesses should start thinking about how they retain customers from the moment they win their first sale.
3. Businesses have to understand what attracted customers to them in the first place. And then build on that as customer expectations evolve.
4. Identifying what your customers want from your business should be a key focus for your retention strategies. Because you have to give them something if they are going to remain loyal.
5. You cannot afford to lose a single sale, let alone a customer these days. But there are many reasons why customers leave.
6. Your customer attrition rate is not necessarily a reflection of how your business is performing. Because there are some uncontrollable factors that affect it.
7. You have to know why your customers want to leave so you can change the way you do business if necessary. Stop them from leaving in the first place.
8. You can never tell exactly when customers are going to walk away from your business. But there are some warning signs that businesses should watch out for.
Customer Retention Strategies: There is never one silver bullet when it comes to customer retention. So businesses should develop and implement a number of different strategies that meet their customers’ evolving needs.
Conclusion:
Customer attrition rates are a problem for all types of businesses, but they are not insurmountable explains Saivian.
The article above provides some tips on how to keep customers engaged with your business. But there are often other things that cause customer attrition.
Customer retention strategies need clear goals and reporting mechanisms. So businesses know exactly what they have achieved and whether or not their strategies are working.
Businesses should keep refining their retention strategies to meet customers’ evolving needs.