Effective Ways to Boost Customer Retention

No matter the industry, customer retention is a critical aspect of sustainability and there are many ways that you can improve this area of your business. In this short article, we offer numerous effective customer retention strategies that you can use with your business.

• Be customer-focused – Think about the customer experience, from initial contact right through to after-sales. Analyze your business processes that involve the customer and collaborate with employees, looking for small ways to improve the customer experience. When a consumer feels that they are treated with respect while receiving top-notch service, they are not going anywhere. Your top clients would receive corporate Christmas cards that allow them to select a charity, which is a win for the community too!
• Engage with social media – Facebook is a brilliant way to open dialogue with your customers and other users. If you want the best results with social media marketing (SMM), approach a leading digital marketing agency and their SMM team will take control of all your SM platforms’ regular posting of quality industry-related content, plus SMM experts who know how to generate positive dialogue with users. The data you get from such interactions is very valuable; imagine how a customer feels when you express your delight at the news their dog has recovered! These little things are all recorded in customer files to build up a complete picture of your clients and data analysis can really help with marketing strategies; the more you know about a customer, the better.
• Customer feedback – The best way to discover how a customer feels about your service is to ask them; to design a short customer review form and send it out on your mobile app or pin it to your Facebook page. Most people are honest when filling in such info and if there are any issues with customer service, this will reveal it. Click here for PR growth tips.
• Personalise when possible – If you send your regular clients a promotional gift at New Year, why not personalize it? This opens a social connection, and your client views you in a different light. Always use the customer’s name in all email correspondence; successful businesses make their customers feel special; introduce the topic at your next staff meeting and note the response.
• Admit your mistakes – Even though a customer issue was not your fault, you are the head of the organization, and admitting a shortcoming humanizes you in the eyes of the client; who doesn’t like a person who man's up and acknowledges their error? Adopting the ’customer is always right’ mode is a good way to ensure happy clients. Offering some form of credit for future purchases is a nice touch when you are apologizing for late delivery.
• Staff training – Contact a local business training provider and they can put together a course on improving customer service and relations. We are all lifelong learners and if your employees are on board, they will appreciate new techniques and knowledge. If you have a large salesforce, arrange online tuition to improve the customer experience and that should see retention figures improve. Talk to your sales manager about after-sales and perhaps suggest some customer feedback, which can be used to make slight tweaks here and there.

If you have all the right metrics in place, you can analyse customer retention to identify weak areas that can be focused on. You could call in a business coach and ask them to take a look at the data; free online sources help you to gain a better understanding of metrics.

Many small businesses fail to focus on the customer experience, and this impacts customer retention; we hope the above strategies help you cement a positive relationship with your customers. It is a good idea to have a few prints put up in the workplace to remind everyone to be focused on the customer experience.