The customer is the king of any industry. In today’s era where the customer is the game changer, organizations cannot afford to lose even one of them. Customer retention is a very challenging task. It is an unavoidable necessity for any organization to plan and implement strategies to reacquire the lost customers. Below are the proven points you can use while making your strategies to acquire the lost customers:
- Support:
Many a time the reason why your customer plans to leave you is because they experience a lack of support from your end. Customers like when they are given attention. If they are facing some issues with the product/service than they would always want that they are attended promptly. Hence, make sure that you have a strong support department and you have shared the contact details of the same with the customers so that they can easily contact you for any query. After receiving the queries make sure to attend the queries and give your customers a proper solution.
- Make a survey:
Circulate a survey to understand customer satisfaction for your product or service. Understand how satisfied are they with your product/service, how often they would like to recommend your offerings in their circle of influence, what changes they would like you to make in your offerings, etc. Share the survey with your old and existing customers. Make sure, for the ease of your customer, you have a scale of 1 to 5 to respond with where 1 means the lowest and 5 means the highest.
With the help of this survey, you can come to know how well your offerings are being received by your customers in the market, what all change you need to incorporate to make sure you don’t lose your customer and how you can retain your old customer. If there is any negative response given in the feedback, you are promptly responding with an apology note for any inconvenience they have faced. Keep your surveys brief and your emailed users don’t need to go to a separate survey site to complete the form. Also, don’t take a small sample segment for the survey — try to cover as many as you can.
- Don’t downgrade your customer:
If you are into a service industry or in any B2B industry, then there are chances that your payments are getting delayed. Maybe because of a constant follow-up the person is tired and does not wish to work with you. In such scenarios, follow-up with the customer with a call or an email saying that you regret for whatever happened in past and you have upgraded your policy now which are to be followed strictly. Assure them that they will not face the same situation again.
- Offer discount:
If your customer has left using your offerings, follow-up with them by offering them some discount or by replacing the product or by paying back for the service. This might make the customer feel that their issues are being taken care of and they are not being ignored. With the help of such offerings, there is a chance to regain the trust of your customer.
- Use the reason for downgrading for retaining:
It is difficult to follow-up with those customers who have left without sharing the reason. Hence, start finding out the customers who have gone without sharing why they have left, have a follow-up call with them for knowing the reason. The right language goes a long way too. So, be sure to communicate how important this information is to you and how much you appreciate the feedback shared.
It is always easy to make a strategy, but it is difficult to implement the same. The above points are the proven tactics that are being used for the customer retention process. We hope you to use this and find the best way to retaining your customers.
We are glad to share we have completed a fabulous 201 weeks of Transformation Tuesday series. It has been a great journey. We hope you enjoy reading them as much as we enjoy sharing these management nuggets.
Written & Compiled by Faber Priyal & Faber Mayuri
