Recent Trends in Customer Retention Programs to Implement This Year

CRM | by Patricia Jones

Excelling at retaining your existing customers is no easy task.
Therefore, if retaining the customers is a part of your job, then it must be difficult to keep both your customers and your boss happy.
This is because even if you are using easy to use CRM software to assist you with the job it is not easy to give your customers the attention and help that they need to maintain a sustained relationship, while at the same instance maximize sales opportunities and decrease customer churn.

Customer retention by as little as 5% can grow your profits by 95% Click To Tweet

Therefore, here is a tried customer retention program that will help you to achieve both and thereby find business growth.

What is a customer retention program?

In simple words, a customer retention program is your best means to keep your customers happy. Since, when you keep holding on to more customers, you can easily decrease your businesses’ churn rate, boost company revenue and thereby increase profitability.

According to a popular statistical report, customer retention by as little as 5% can grow your profits by 95%.

However, to make your businesses’ customer retention program really work, you need to make it a part of your businesses’ daily routine.

Therefore, to let us get started here we have put together a few key customer retention programs that you can implement immediately for decreasing churn and find rapid business growth .

Create a onboarding program

The very first program for customer retention that you must have in your checklist is implementing a customer onboarding strategy into your daily routine.

Customer onboarding is the process you require to make customers use your products and services in the easiest possible way in order to make them achieve their goals.

To conduct a proper onboarding of your new customers, primarily thank the customer for coming on-board and choosing your brand.

Apart from it during your onboarding calls you can also cover the following points mentioned below:

Discuss with your customer as to how they want to get started and line up your efforts to match their expectations.
Offer your customer additional services to start-up.
Make your customers familiar with all your community websites, videos, and webinars that you can offer and also help them to overcome the common obstacles faced by others.
Send a welcome mail to your new customer after the primary onboarding conversation, with a small picture of yourself, so that the customer has a face to go with your brand.

Create customer follow up programs

According to a survey done by Econsultancy, more than 82% business organizations acknowledge that customer retention is less labor-intensive and cheaper than closing a new deal, which makes it the main driver of any company’s revenue.

Now, do not be worried thinking that you have to use up all day calling each and every customer in your CRM database.

According to the Pareto principle, which most of us are aware of, only 20% of your customers generate 80% of your organization’s revenue.

Now, if you are using easy to use CRM software it can create clear indicators that can aid you in identifying the customers those that must receive most of your attention, and help you to spend your time on the right customers efficiently.

To do this set up your CRM software solution to segment your customers into three basic groups.

A customers or large accounts
B customers or medium sized accounts
C customers or small accounts

Now, while for large accounts you can schedule face-to-face meeting with the customers or follow up with the customer once every month with medium-sized and small accounts, you can provide them a half-yearly follow up, send newsletters and keep them updated on seasonal price offers or any other campaigns your company is having for the consumers of your offerings.

Identify risk customers

In most cases, customers will stop doing business with you because they are not satisfied either with your products or your support services.

Therefore, to retain customers and prevent churn it is crucial that you must identify risky customers as a part of your daily customer retention program.

According to Forrester, it cost 5 times more to acquire new customers than retain your existing ones.

Here are some of the ways you can identify the risky customers in your business:

Be proactive and create an overview of customers with too many open tickets, which is a red flag and should be managed with proper follow up.
Create an overview of customers that shows disruptive buying patterns. If a customer has bought every month over a year and then all of a sudden do not order any product for the next six months, pick up the phone to check out what is going on.
Create an overview of customers who are calling up regularly with questions and complaints. These demanding customers most often need training or another services to get them up and running.

Easy to use CRM software be it Salesforce for enterprises or Salesforce Alternative CRM mostly used by startups and small businesses, CRM is a tool that can easily create this overview so that you can provide better support after identifying your risky customers to reduce churn and grow your business.

Win back lost customers

Why spend your resources on winning new customers when you can use those efforts to win back lost customers in your CRM database.

According to Jill Griffin’s book “Customer Winback: How to Recapture Lost Customers-And Keep Them Loyal” most businesses have 20-40 percent chance of selling to their lost customers, whilst the chance for selling to new customers are only 5-20 percent in this competitive marketplace.

Here are some of the key reasons why you should focus on winning back lost customers:

Lost customers have once shown that they are interested in your offerings, and so they are superior prospects than arbitrary leads on your cold calling list.
Lost customers already know your brand, and so you require lesser time to educate them.
You can use technology to keep track of customers that you already know, follow their past buying patterns and create tailor-made offers to win them back.

Winning back lost customers can have a snowball effect, whereby when you succeed in winning lost customers, and they become satisfied with your brand, it might generate word of mouth advertisement, which will help you to boost your chance of winning new prospects, as 91% of B2B customers are influenced by word-of-mouth and referrals when they make their buying decisions for new products and services.

Wrapping Up

Therefore, stop managing your customers in an ad-hoc manner, since retaining customers not only requires hard work, but it also requires the right customer retention program that you must implement in your daily routine to see an increase in customer satisfaction score, revenue growth, and productivity.