Happy and satisfied customers are the base of every successful business. For the majority of businesses, repeat customers are an important factor that keeps them growing. Retaining customers is far better than acquiring new ones citing the time, energy, and resources to be spent. According to research, acquiring a new customer costs 5 times more than retaining the existing ones.
Looking at the bigger picture, the consequences of losing even one customer are much higher. One lost customer can affect your brand value and impact potential customers through negative word-of-mouth, reviews, and ratings. Businesses need to work on strategies to improve customer retention for sustainable growth.
The decline in customer retention rate is a cause of concern and must be tackled by revolutionizing the customer service experiences. Brands must focus on improving CX, building a competitive edge by offering great deals and superior quality customer service, and fine-tuning their product range per customer expectations.
What is Customer Retention?
Customer retention is the process of engaging existing customers and making them stick to your brand instead of shifting to competitive brands. It is a set of actions for strengthening customer relationships and providing remarkable experiences whenever they interact with your brand.
Focusing on customer retention can help businesses of all sizes gain a competitive edge. The prime reason for businesses to focus on customer retention is to embrace their existing customer base. But how?
Businesses can use various methods for improving customer retention using the strategies mentioned below.
1. Build Customer Trust
Winning customer trust is a key strength parameter for businesses in order to withstand the competitive business environment. Providing remarkable customer experiences, recognizing customers’ needs, and keeping up with customers’ expectations are some ways to build customer trust.
Besides providing quality customer service and understanding customer sentiments, businesses must focus on building a customer-centric call center team. A team that is well-equipped with all the necessary information and provides quick resolutions to customer concerns strengthens customers’ trust in the brand. As a result, brands benefit from positive word-of-mouth publicity and customer referrals. A strong customer trust plays a key role in establishing brands in the market.
2. Stay 24*7 Available
Customers appreciate brands that listen to them and provide 24*7 customer service, whenever they want. Staying available round-the-clock is no longer a luxury for customers, but it’s a necessity. Therefore, brands must adapt to the latest AI-driven smart chatbot technology in order to effectively assist customers.
For growing brands, it is not possible to have a dedicated team available 24*7, however, with the AI-powered customer engagement solutions, brands can ensure timely responses to common customer concerns, while their human agents focus on more strategic conversations. This reduces the flow of interactions in the queue and ensures customers are addressed on time.
To further improve self-service, businesses are also developing insightful knowledge bases that provide access to learning resources such as blogs, videos, webinars, podcasts, etc. Customers can utilize these self-serve resources at any point in time to get solutions.
3. Focusing on Continuous Improvement
With ever-changing customer expectations, it is crucial for brands to keep up with the latest trends and consistently upgrade their deliverables. In order to keep focusing on continuous improvement, brands must listen to the voice of customer through customer engagement channels and act on it.
Voice of Customer analytics is a key to retaining customers, as it identifies the opportunity areas for improving customer service. Good customer service effectively engages customers with your brand. Improvement can be shown by providing quick resolutions, support across multiple channels, and remarkable experiences.
To improve customer service, ensure all frontline team members are aligned and understand the core of prioritizing customer requirements & promptly addressing them.
4. Reward Customer Loyalty
Repeat customers are an asset to any business. Therefore, they must be appreciated from time-to-time, in order to keep them engaged with your brand. Bringing in programs to reward loyal customers is an important parameter to strengthening an existing relationship.
Brands must introduce customer loyalty offers & points, discounts, and other perks for recognizing customers. Occasional thank you notes, festive offers, recommending products based on their previous purchases, and providing delightful experiences such as sending birthday or anniversary greetings are great ways to remind customers that they matter.
5. Providing High-Quality Interactions
Retaining customers is easy with high-quality interactions. Most customers lose their interest in a brand with even a single negative experience. Therefore, call center agents must be trained on appropriately handling customer objections. If agents are not trained well, they might not be able to provide high-quality customer interactions.
Customer retention can be strengthened by providing quality interactions with customers. In a nutshell, building a team of robust customer service representatives will not only improve the interaction quality, but it will also help in representing a strong brand image.
6. Respond Quickly to Customers
It is crucial for businesses to understand the value of customers’ time. The best way to do this is by providing quick responses to their concerns.
Brands must build an omnichannel integrated technology infrastructure for effectively engaging with customers through multiple engagement channels. The integrated tech stack also provides a complete trail of previous customer interactions, ensuring quick access to customer behavioral insights. Businesses that have provided such support have improved customer retention rates compared to those having limited customer support mediums.
Quick, accurate responses make customers feel valued, helping them to find solutions. Customers are prone to jumping on to other brands when they feel unheard. Quick responses in such cases can do wonders by keeping the customers engaged with your brand.
7. Meeting Customer Expectations
The key to retaining customers is to meet their expectations at every step, and the key to understanding their expectations is by listening to customer interactions. Speech analytics can provide an in-depth view of customer expectations and sentiments and helps in understanding their expectations.
As a business, you truly need to understand your customers, their requirements from you, what challenges they are facing in the competitive marketplace, etc. By understanding their challenges, brands can provide personalized experiences and improved customer satisfaction. Always remember, that it is easier to retain customers when you focus on customer satisfaction.
8. Conduct Customer Service Surveys
Post-service surveys are an effective way to collect customer feedback. First of all, it makes them feel valued, while also providing you with the necessary information on improvement areas such as the behavior of your representatives, the effectiveness of resolution provided, opportunities to enhance customer experiences, etc. Collecting this information empowers brands to make data-driven strategic decisions and improve the quality of customer services.
Customer service surveys also increase customer engagement by providing a platform for customers for sharing their experience with the brand, including detailed feedback and suggestions.
9. Improving Brand Awareness
Are your customers well-informed about your offerings?
How are you sharing information & creating brand awareness among existing customers?
In order to effectively engage customers with your brand & retain them, it is necessary to update them on a regular basis about recent introductions, updates in the products or services, and take their feedback on any changes.
To develop a strong brand, it is necessary to segment the customers based on their preferences and update them by sharing empathetic stories, upgrades, trial offers, competitions, and other engagement programs.
This not only engages the customers but also ensures they always buy from you.
There are many ways that can help businesses improve customer retention, you just need to pick the ones that work best for your business. As customer behavior is continuously evolving, you need to keep finding ways to increase their satisfaction. However, engaging, educating, and coming up with quality services remain the most reliable methods for increasing customer retention rates.
QEval is SaaS-Based Call Center Quality Monitoring Solution. It is an all-inclusive solution powered with best-in-class ASR technology and sits on the top of your existing tech stack. QEval identifies knowledge gaps, provides business insights, distinguishes and quantifies coaching needs, improves client retention, and much more.
Investing in solutions like QEval can help you develop an understanding of the ever-changing customer behavior dynamics so you can bring in strategies that work well for your business.
Want to see how it works? Request a demo here.
