The world has become very dense and developed now. It does not matter what startup or business you are doing; you will find cutthroat competition today or tomorrow. Thus, it would be best if you first looked for strategies to survive, and then you’ll automatically thrive. The question arrives: how will you survive in a business where you have cutthroat competition and competitors. Plus, digitalization and e-commerce have made it easier for customers to move from one brand to another. Well, all of these concerns have one answer, and that is Customer Retention. Whether you believe it or not, customer retention is way easier and effective than getting customers. There is no guarantee that the customers you are creating are going to stay or not. So it is best to try to develop such customer service that will force your customers to stay. Hence, customer retention is the strategy to keep your business alive.
What is Customer Retention?
As the term speaks for itself, retaining customers. In layman’s terms, customer retention means opting for such strategies, making your customers repeat buyers of your product or services. Thus preventing them from looking for another option or brand. But keeping an existing customer is not as easy as it sounds. Instead, it is hard to keep an existing customer.
And if you can keep your existing customers, it means that your product pleases your customer. Believe it or not, customer retention is the life of most service providers and subscription-based companies nowadays.
There are many business strategies and initiatives that businesses have to put in place to build customer loyalty and retain their existing customers. And seven such effective customer retention strategies we are going to discuss in this article that will build customer loyalty for your business. And these strategies are even effective for startups. So let’s not waste a lot of time and begin with discussing such a strategy.
Best strategies to build customer retention
If you aim to build customer retention, you should better aim to create an impeccable customer experience. It is so because a lot of surveys have proven that customer experience makes customers stay. According to some popular customer retention stats, 77 percent of the customers remain loyal to the brands and companies that offer a good customer experience whenever they have issues. And 72 percent of such customers are willing to spend more on companies and brands that provide excellent and reliable customer experience and customer service.
As a startup, you should work on the following strategies to build an impeccable customer experience and to retain your customers:
- You should build a personalized interactive interaction with your customers
- And not just customers, you also have to invest in your employees
- Always ask for customer feedback
- Your customers should trust and rely on you
- Provide swift and effective support to your customers
- Get close to your customers, instead of bringing them closer
- Occasionally reward your customers for their loyalty towards the brand
As mentioned above, these are the most essential and practical strategies that any business or even startup should use to build customer retention. Now let’s discuss the same strategy in detail.
1. Build a personalized interactive interaction with your customers
A good customer experience will make your existing customer stay is not a guarantee, but a bad customer experience will definitely make your customers leave. And any product can give issues, but how well you treat and revolve your customers’ issues decides the customer retention. If your customer is having the same kind of issues with your product over and over they might leave you. But if such customers have repetitive and exhausting interactions with your customer support, they will recommend to others not to buy your product.
A key to preventing such situations where an ex-customer might recommend others to avoid buying your products is investing in your customer support agents. It would be best if you built such programs for your customer support agents to elevate the quality of their conversation with the customers. Your customer support staff should be able to skillfully handle the customer information, and along with that, they should also be well in handling and manipulating the customer’s temper.
2 Invest in your employees
As I mentioned in the last section, you need to build customer handling skills in your employees. You can also hire an already well-experienced staff, but every company has its ethics and values towards their customers. So, in the end, you have to invest in your employees to provide a personalized experience to your customers. You can start generating tickets regarding different kinds of customer issues and concerns so that there should not be any confusion in transferring a particular problem to its respective department. This is also going to save you a lot of time and hard work. And eventually, you can provide a quick solution to your customers. Thus a streamlined and quick ticket system will make things better for both your customers and support agents.
3. Always ask for customer feedback
It is hard to succeed without improving all the mistakes. Suppose you don't know how your consumers feel about your services, which will make it hard for you to work on it. To commence retaining customers, you need a process for collecting customer feedback and sharing that information with the rest of your organization. This is the time where a customer feedback loop comes in. It presents a system for collecting, analyzing, and distributing customer reviews and surveys. The moment you have collected the feedback, you should examine your survey results by looking for trends in customer behavior and other areas to enhance user experience.
4. Your customers should trust and rely on you
Take note of two critical points mentioned below that will help when building trust for the customer :
- Please don’t assume they trust you because they buy from you.
- It takes time to build trust.
The moment you decide to make a purchase, 81% of customers say that trust is an important aspect. Fabricating trust isn’t a skill that any business can implement overnight and achieve great success. After all, the meaning of trust is the “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.” Reliability is a critical factor in building trust, so your company should consistently deliver value to consumers. Always following through on your brand promise and doing what you say you will do over time will impact.
5. Provide swift and effective support to your customers
Support systems assist you in productively interacting with your consumers and present them with the right level of support. A support system can support both pre and post-sale by enabling you, or a customer service rep, to interact with the customer. Suppose you have a live chat or help desk tool available. In that case, you can turn a customer question into a sale or a customer complaint into a resolution, whether they come in on-site, through email, or via social media. Having effectively resolved complaints or problems can turn an unhappy customer into a loyal, repeat customer. And that's to say nothing of the value of customer feedback, which can support you to improve your products and your overall experience.
6. Get close to your customers, instead of bringing them closer
In case your customers aren't reaching out with feedback, your team should be proactive in communicating with them. Get-up-close and personal with the customers. When the customers haven't interacted with your brand for a while, you should reach out and re-establish your relationship. Consider choosing a communication calendar to maintain customer engagements and design possibilities to upsell and cross-sell.
7. Occasionally reward your customers for their loyalty towards the brand
The whole point in rewarding people is to make them repeat their behavior, which means providing you with more business. If done correctly, improving customer loyalty for a variety of programs will increase the brand awareness of your company. Still, it will have a direct impact on your bottom line. Many companies offer discounted pricing to new customers. But, offering incentives to only first-time buyers while failing to recognize and take care of repeat ones could cause you to lose the most loyal clients to your company. The whole idea should make customers want to be appreciated for the money they spend at your business.
Now that you know all the points that can assist your customer retention. Follow these strategies and give wings to your business.
The customer’s feedback, opinion, and expectations for your products or services are described in the Voice of the Customer.
It helps you understand the feeling, connectivity, and perception your customers feel.
businesses use VoC to increase customer retention and build a legion of loyal customers.It is required for functions such as customer service, operations, and product analysis.
Organizations use this solution to identify and improve all stages of the customer journey by collaborating to improve their products and services.A positive customer experience can help you increase a customer’s lifetime value and retention rate by nearly 55 percent.Companies that implement a Voice of the Customer solution not only strengthen their relationships with their customers but also improve internal relations between departments.Positive customer sentiment can boost revenue by 4–8 percent and a customer’s lifetime value by 6–14 times.
The Benefit of Employing the Voice of Customer solution for your brandImprove retention of customersAssess new product ideas, concepts, and solutionsChange your products, services, add-ons, and features to satisfy your customers’ needs and requirementsFind potential brand crisis at the earliestBetter service to your clients Methods for Gathering Data for the Voice of the Customer ProgramOnline Customer SurveysConducting online customer surveys is also an excellent way to collect data.
These surveys assist you in better understanding your customers and addressing their concerns.You should ask the right questions using the right platform, you may never receive reliable answers.
Everything from the very first contact with them to keeping them engaged with the brand needs to be carefully managed to provide them the best experience needed.
In this post, we will discuss how businesses can utilize call center services to help improve their customer lifecycle management.
Before we can go into the ways that call center services can, we must understand what exactly is customer lifecycle management and the various stages that are involved in it.
Stages of Customer Lifecycle Management
There are mainly four stages of CLM (Customer Lifecycle Management). These stages can differ based on each organization and its business goals. In this post, we will discuss the four stages that will be recognized by most of the companies out there.
Stage 1 – Customer Acquisition
As it is clear from the name, this activity refers to acquiring new customers for the business. This is the primary stage where your business establishes contact with a new customer for the first time with the hopes of converting them from a prospect to a paying customer or client. This activity is necessary for the growth of any business. You need to grow your customer base in order to maintain a constant growth of the organization.
Stage 2- Customer Engagement
The second stage of CLM is customer engagement. When you acquire a customer and they have been with the brand for a while but now their usage of your product or service has declined, you need to increase their engagement with your brand. It could be in the form of using your app more or visiting your website more often. Customer engagement ensures a customer’s loyalty to the brand and puts the business at ease about whether customers will stay with the brand or not.
Stage 3 – Customer Retention
Retaining your existing customers is an extremely import part of customer lifecycle management. If you lose your customers, it will have a negative impact on your business’s bottom line. It will also lead to the increase in marketing costs and customer acquisition costs. A good customer retention strategy can not only save costs but lead to stronger brand profile overall.
Stage 4 – Customer Feedback
This stage lets a business understand how loyal a customer is to their brand. You get to know what they feel about your product or services, what they like, what they dislike and most importantly, the changes they would like to see. It helps a business become better by implementing the changes that customers want and it makes the customers feel appreciated when they see their opinions have been valued.
Call Center Services and Customer Lifecycle Management
All the above four stages or the entire CLM process requires a company to have dedicated teams of professionals that have experience dealing with each and every such stage. Outsourcing call center services help a business handle these complex stages using experienced staff and techniques.
A right outsourcing company can provide a business with customer acquisition services using outbound and inbound telemarketing and lead generation services that help a business increase its customer base thus increasing overall revenues. Similarly, that same company can handle customer engagement by reaching out to customers and informing them of new features as well as offers related to a business’s services.
Customer retention processes are also carried out by call center services. Customers that wish to leave your services will be contacted by the call center team to understand the root cause of them leaving and provide those customers with the required incentives to stick by the brand. The fourth stage of CLM, getting feedback from the customers is also handled by call centers through their customer survey process where customers are contacted to conduct a quick survey to know the overall level of satisfaction they have with the services.
Conclusion:
In the end, what really matters is finding the right call center partner that can deploy a team that can get your customers through all entire customer lifecycle management process efficiently thus helping businesses reduce their costs and boost profits
COVID-19 Impact Analysis on Customer Experience Management Market report published by Value Market Research provides a detailed market analysis comprising market size, share, value, growth and trends for the period 2019-2027.
The report encompasses data regarding market share and recent developments by key players.
Moreover, this market report also covers regional and country markets in detail.The research report also covers the comprehensive profiles of the key players in the market and an in-depth view of the competitive landscape worldwide.
The major players in the Customer Experience Management include Avaya Inc., Adobe Genesys, IBM, Oracle, Open Text Corporation, Verint, SAP SE..
This section includes a holistic view of the competitive landscape that includes various strategic developments such as key mergers & acquisitions, future capacities, partnerships, financial overviews, collaborations, new product developments, new product launches, and other developments.Get more information on "Global Customer Experience Management Research Report" by requesting FREE Sample Copy at https://www.valuemarketresearch.com/contact/customer-experience-management-market/download-sampleMarket SegmentationThe broad Customer Experience Management has been sub-grouped into the Analytical Tools, TouchPoint Type, Deployment, End-User and Region.
The report studies these subsets with respect to the geographical segmentation.
