Building a small business comes with many challenges, making it an overwhelming experience at times.
And the challenge we’re addressing today is lowering customer churn and keeping them happy and loyal in the long run.
Retaining existing customers is cheaper, and there is value in offering them recurring services and products. According to Harvard, if you can manage a 5% increase in your retention rate, you’ll see a 25-95% profit boost.
Why You Should Use Customer Retention Strategies
Did you know that the probability of selling to a returning customer is 3 to 35 times higher than a new one?
While that’s a huge benefit on its own, there are many other reasons for focusing on customer retention:
- Retaining customers is cheaper than finding new ones.
- Existing customers have already done business with you, so it’s easier to continue if they’re happy.
- Loyal customers are better ambassadors for your business.
- Returning customers are six times more likely to try new products from your brand.
- Customer feedback from returning customers can help improve your services and products.
5 Ways to Improve Your Customer Retention
You don’t need complicated strategies to improve your customer retention. All it often takes is listening to your customer and ensuring they’re happy.
Here’s how:
1. Don’t Ignore Questions
Your customers want to feel valued. So when they ask questions, they expect to be answered.
This is a basic but valuable retention strategy. You spend so much time creating a product and marketing it so losing a customer over a simple action is detrimental to your brand.
For example, a customer may ask about a feature that you thought was pretty straightforward to use. First, you want to ensure that they know how to use your product or service. But, this question is also a clue that you could review your FAQs and guidelines.
Customer questions are direct feedback, and as they say, “feedback is a gift”.
2. Accept and Resolve Complaints
Customer satisfaction is the core of customer retention. Customer complaints are a usual occurrence, and your brand will often be judged on how they handle the complaint.
One way to improve customer retention is to develop a sound strategy for dealing with complaints. The best way to do this is to deal with the complaint as soon as possible. Don’t give the customer time to brood and switch to another brand.
Suppose you’re late in handling complaints. Word will spread like wildfire in your customer base, and you might lose more than just one customer. It only takes one unhappy customer to start a viral trend on social media.
3. Actively Maintain Social Media
We live in an ever-changing digital age. There is now more than one avenue to connect with your customers and keep them updated. Remember that phrase – “out of sight, out of mind”?.
Suppose you aren’t active on your social media and constantly reminding your customers of your existence. They might forget about you and move on to other options. For example – if you’re a juice brand, your customers may not know you just introduced a new flavor until they see a social media post.
So, work social media into your customer retention strategy and your overall customer journey.
4. Focus on After-Sales Services
After-sales services are a great way to retain your existing customers. For example, your company may offer granite installation services for bathrooms and kitchens. After the installation is done, maintenance and cleaning could be part of your after-sales services.
You may be back in your customer’s house for routine maintenance and clean-up sessions. By this time, they may need other upgrades done to the house.
After-sales can be a great way to keep you on top of your customer’s minds and ensure they contact you when needed.
5. Reach Out Often
Show your customers you care about them. An excellent way to do this is to collect customer data and use it to your advantage. For example, you can send out birthday emails with a unique discount to individual customers.
This will make them feel valued and induce loyalty to your brand.
Why Outsource Customer Retention to a BPO Firm?
Small business owners often wear multiple hats and are busily expanding the business. In such an overwhelming situation, customer retention can take a back seat. Outsourcing your customer retention to a BPO firm like Day BPO can ease your worries.
Day BPO offers a comprehensive suite of services in multiple languages. So, even if you have an international customer base, your customer retention strategy will be adapted to their language and culture.
Access a team that’s available 24/7 and is able to create and execute the right strategies to retain customers.