We have all heard many times that it is much cheaper to keep a customer loyal to your company than to acquire new customers.
And this statement makes perfect sense, after all, all costs of prospecting, advertising, visits and presentations are eliminated, when selling to a current customer.
Thus, once you know how to retain customers, your profitability tends to increase, especially if up selling (selling higher values to customers) and cross selling (generating complementary sales) practices are adopted.
But how to retain customers in the company? What must be done to achieve this goal?
In this post, we will present 5 suggestions on how to decrease the loss of customers in your business, the so-called churn rate .
Learn more: Why calculating churn rates can help build customer loyalty?
How to retain customers in your business
Of the 5 tips we are going to give you on how to avoid losing customers, the first is one of the most important, check out:
1- Don’t sell to those who don’t need you
One of the biggest causes of customer loss happens when they discover that what they have purchased does not meet their needs.
This can happen by accident, due to an inadequate qualification of your leads. But, if it is an intentional act, that is, pushing sales at any cost, in addition to being unethical, it is a terrible sales strategy.
Think about it : there is no way to retain customers in your business if word of mouth from dissatisfied customers begins to spread across the market.
Therefore, train your marketing and sales forces to proceed with a sale only if the solution your company offers is truly beneficial to the customer.
It is better to lose a sale now, than to have a dissatisfied customer in the future, speaking ill of your business.
2- Onboarding
Onboarding is the process that starts as soon as a customer buys a product or service from your company and you do everything to make them “feel at home”.
The customer needs to quickly see the full value of his solution for him or his business. If this takes time, he may find that what was promised by the seller is not coming to fruition.
Therefore, one way of retaining customers, widely used by B2B companies, is to follow them closely in the first weeks or even months, depending on the time needed for the benefits of your solution to be very clear to customers.
See more: How Calculating the Churn Rate Can Help Your Business
3- Customer Success
Even after your customer has realized the value of your solution, it needs to continue delivering what it promises, in a sustainable way.
The results must come, or the customer will give up on your company.
To avoid this, there is a practice on how to retain customers called Customer Success, that is, maintaining a team especially to monitor the customer’s results.
In this process, it will eventually be necessary to provide a kind of consultancy for him to achieve success in his business, with the help of the correct use of the solution that his company sold to him.
See also: How to retain customers through customer experience
4- High quality service
A survey released by Harvard Business Review shows that 65% of customers who have had a bad customer service experience will speak ill of your company to someone, with 48% speaking ill of your company to 10 or more people .
We repeat: there is no way to retain customers with this type of negative advertising.
Therefore, it is essential to have a level of customer service that meets your expectations.
See how to manage customer service in this post: Check out details of the ITIL Service Desk Process Workflow
5- Continuous improvement
Your customers may be satisfied with your products and services, as well as with your service, but you must always evolve.
Commercial relations and markets are increasingly dynamic and, to meet the needs of customers, it is necessary to always innovate.
Therefore, maintain a process of continuous improvement of your processes, products and services, based on feedback from your customers.
