Increase Customer Retention Rates with These Proven Tips

Great job, you’ve landed a new client. Now what strategies can you deploy to ensure they STAY a satisfied client? A solid customer retention strategy is key to increased revenue, long term success and growth.

Many companies place a lot of focus on their customers. The continued relationship is where things can get a bit tricky. Maintaining good customer satisfaction can lead to a long relationship. On the other hand, a poor experience may lead to customer churn and burn and no one wants that. So, which methods of maintaining communication and high customer satisfaction are the most effective at improving customer retention rates? Below are tips we’ve deployed with our clients that have proven to increase customer retention.

1. Offer Great Customer Service

No brainer right? Unfortunately not all companies offer great customer service. It can be a much easier job to keep an existing client than it is to acquire a new one. The best strategy, in my view, is great customer service with the intent to help out. Another one is asking customers questions related to products and making sure that you incorporate as much feedback as possible, especially the feedback that comes up constantly and is consistent between customers

2. Know Your Customer

The best way to avoid customer churn and burn is to know your customers deeply and always put them first. Understand your customers inside and out, and make sure that the product or service you are providing is keeping them happy. If it's not, enact whatever changes are needed until they are satisfied. Instead of seeking out a silver bullet, ensure that customer-centricity is always core to your business

3. Foresee Potential Problems and Solve Them Problem Before It Starts

Create a team that's responsible for proactive outreach on a scheduled basis for clients to stop any issues before they begin to become a problem. Use your Net Promoter Score (NPS) to better gauge the success of outreach and track their utilization of the product or service. Set triggers for different events during the client journey to identify when outreach should occur.

4. Use NPS Score To Identify In-Danger Accounts

One of the most effective methods that I've used to identify upcoming churn is the NPS score. It can help identify potential "in-danger" accounts. Prior to sending out your NPS campaign, ensure that you have an action plan for low-scoring accounts. Savvy customers who are unhappy almost expect it.

5. Adapt To A Never-Ending Buying-Selling Cycle

Stop thinking of the buyer’s journey as linear (first consideration, then purchase and implementation), and think of it as a continuous set of distinct buying processes. For example, it's likely that the folks involved in making the initial purchase decision will move on, and you'll work with new folks who weren't part of that decision. This is no longer a "renewal" it's a new sales cycle.

6. Create Post-Sale Relationships

One of the biggest fallacies in metric-driven sales processes is that the sale ends after the contract is signed. Too many sales reps pass the buck and don't adequately maintain any semblance of post-sales relationships, which is one of the most important parts of the job. Focus on fostering relationships post-sale and you could have lower churn rates and increased lifetime customer value.

7. Segment Your Client Base

Segmenting your clients will allow you to conduct a full analysis of which clients are most important to retain. These clients may generate the most revenue, have the most impact on your brand, provide the greatest avenue to new clients, and so on. Figure out who these clients are, put together a retention initiative that has a private-client feel to it, and implement it using both human capital and technology.

8. Listen And Iterate

Always understand the clients point of view. Figure out why they are leaving you should see it coming back down to a few of the same issues. Improve those issues and start tracking churn on a new cohort of customers after you make those improvements. There will always be things to improve, but hopefully you'll get some stuff right

The above list are methods we’ve deployed with our clients and have helped improve customer retention rates. However customer retention strategies can differ contingent upon the clients product or service being offered. The point of this article is impress the importance of having a customer retention strategy and ensure it’s implemented on a daily basis.

Thank you for reading