7 Customer Retention tips that are miserably overlooked
Here's a simple truth, it's cheaper to retain a
customer than to acquire a new one, we've been told since birth. You should be focusing on building trust from the
first moment you interact with a prospect, and from then on, never take your
foot off the pedal. Keep nurturing your prospects as you would in any healthy
relationship.
If you are
currently focusing all your marketing efforts on attracting, converting and
closing your customers - you are failing on what might be the most important
stage – retaining and delighting your most precious assets – your current
customers. Just as you would not buy a plant and then move on to buy another
only to stop watering the first plant, don't neglect your customers.
Here are some
customer retention tips to get you on track:
Know your customer
personas
Make sure
you know who your customers are. Learn their challenges and needs. Send out
surveys, create loyalty events, and reach out to them just to ask if there is
anything you can help them with.
Be innovative
Deliver to
your clients in accordance with their needs. Stay ahead of the game and don't
let them settle for a product or service that might be losing relevance, or
simply not helping them enough.
Educate
Always
provide added value, educate your prospects and see how you can help them
achieve their goals. This can be done by creating special content offers,
personal emails, regularly posting educational material in your company blog,
conducting webinars, conferences and more. The rule of thumb is that your
content should be aligned with your prospects' needs and challenges.
Be
personal, listen, and ask. In each interaction with a customer, follow the Pareto (80/20%) principle – listen 80%
of the time, talk 20% of the time. Acknowledge your customer's needs and
empathize with them.
Make sure
to use social monitoring as a listening aid. Find out what their current
problems and goals are. Record, measure and track all interactions with your
customers. Pay
attention to non-verbal cues - expressions, voice, body language and general
sub-text.
If a
customer is telling you that "everything is great" don't pat yourself
on the back and move on to the next customer. Find out what they are happy
about and dig into what you might be able to improve in their experience.
Follow up
65% of
customers surveyed by Hubspot have
stopped buying from a company after just one(!) customer service mistake.
Be sure to
solve ALL of your prospects problems. Don't assume that if a customer has
stopped complaining about an issue, that they happily understood it's
irrelevant. Chances are they are fed up and have lost their trust in you. How
sad!
Always
follow up and always do it ASAP. NEVER EVER take longer than you promised.
Saying "Hello Mr. Customer, I apologize but I still don't have an answer
to your issue, I will be sure to check back and keep you posted within the next
three days" is a perfectly legitimate follow up interaction (needless to
say – do take the time to actually try and solve the issue, don't create an
endless loop)
Focus on
your customer's experience. When speaking with your customers don't boast about
your company's achievements; rather, talk about how your vision and metrics can benefit
them.
Your customers don't care about your one-sided goals, and why should they? Focus on your mutual goals and remember that in a long term game, if your success doesn't correlate with your customers’ success, you need to re-evaluate you point of view and metrics.
Your customers don't care about your one-sided goals, and why should they? Focus on your mutual goals and remember that in a long term game, if your success doesn't correlate with your customers’ success, you need to re-evaluate you point of view and metrics.
Build your dream
team
CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh, said Customer Service shouldn’t just be a department; it should
be the entire company. Be
sure to hire people who are foremost people – train them for skill. See that
they fit culturally in your organization, and that they are in line with your
company’s overall agenda. When interviewing potential team members, prepare
culture-specific interview questions, and set cultural expectations in advance.
Everyone on
board should understand that they are representing their company in each
interaction with prospects and clients. Each interaction is part of the
larger customer experience; and your team members should be using your
company product or service themselves.
Retaining
customers should be one of your company’s top missions and one that all team
members should be active participants in. A deep understanding of your
customers, clear work principles and a curious emphatic state of mind are key
principles to adopt and adapt.
A happy
customer is a potential ambassador. No reason to miss out on that. Maya
Angelou had said “they may forget what you said, but they will never forget how
you made them feel.”
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