4 Tips for Increasing Customer Retention

At the core of almost every business success is one thing, the consumer. It is not businesses that create their own success, it is consumers that do so. As such, every business that hopes for longevity must put excellent customer service at the top of their concerns. If you don’t, you won’t be able to retain the customers you need to survive. Below are four tips for increasing customer retention.

Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Companies have a strong incentive to try to foster customer loyalty. According to Harvard, a five percent increase in customer retention can produce an increase in profits by 25 to 95 percent. For all intents and purposes, customer retention is the key to success. For many companies, one of the tools they use to help produce customer retention is an official customer loyalty program that individual customers can enroll in.

Such a program will track the purchases a customer makes and then provide them with rewards based on that purchase history. For example, a sandwich shop may give a customer a free sandwich after their sixth sandwich purchase. Other companies may give store credit or special merchandise produced just for their loyalty program. Overall, creating such a program is a good idea. It can incentivize consumers to keep making future purchases. It will also show those loyal customers that you do in fact recognize their loyalty and wish to reward them for it. Alternatively, customers who feel like they are taken for granted won’t be loyal to a brand for long.

Perform Market Research

To retain customers, you need to first understand exactly who they are. Once you understand their backgrounds, needs, and preferences, you can then better mold your products, marketing, and customer service efforts around best serving them. Put in the time, money, and resources to get a better understanding of who is most interested in your products and services by performing the needed market research. This research should include collecting data regarding demographic information of likely customers and other relevant information such as how they would prefer to make purchases. What you learn can make a huge difference regarding how you proceed with your company. Think, for example, of a company that assumed their largest target market was teens but later discovered seniors were most likely to be their actual paying customers. This would change how that business operates on a fundamental level.

Adopt Customer Geared Software Solutions

Something else that is very important for creating customer retention is customer engagement. It has become a bit of a business buzzword, but you can probably best define it as the totality of the interactions between a customer and a brand. The depth of these interactions can vary. The deeper the engagement, typically, the better for the company. Regardless, they are obviously extremely important for keeping an individual consumer’s business for the long term.

One way to help foster this engagement is through the adoption of a software-based platform to track all customer interactions. This is sometimes referred to as a customer relationship management system, although the specific terminology can differ. The best platforms, however, should combine different forms of engagement such as email, live chat, support tickets, social media, and more to produce a more holistic view of the engagement between the customer and the brand. This can then be used by your sales and customer service teams for the benefit of both the company and those individual customers.

Train Your Employees on How to Provide Excellent Customer Service

While you can institute as many customer-centered programs as you wish at the managerial level, in the end, it’s the interactions between low-level employees and the end customer that will determine the success of any effort to retain customers. If your employees are rude to customers or tend to ignore their concerns, it won’t matter how customer-centered you believe your company culture is. You will lose that business. Instead, you must make providing excellent customer service the centerpiece of any employee training program. Those who are not on board with providing that kind of hospitality should be weeded out of the organization early before they do any long-term damage to your brand. Those employees that do treat customers with high levels of courtesy and empathy should be moved up the corporate ladder.

Customer retention is integral for surviving for the long term as a business. Do what you can to foster customer loyalty at all levels of your business all the way down to the lowest level employee. The customers you have today are likely to be the ones that will allow your company to prosper in the future if you can manage to hang on to them.