We have all heard the statement it’s harder to win new business, some say up to 25% more effort to acquire a new client than to retain an existing one. The better you understand clients and familiarise yourself with their business needs, the stronger and more effective you will be at closing business. Research undertaken by Bain&Co indicated increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25%. And an existing customer is 50% more likely to try your new products compared to new customers.
Getting your customer retention right by as little as 5% can send profits soaring up to 95%.
Post-Covid getting new clients is looking like it may be even tougher. For many, spending a lot of time attracting new business is going to be the number one priority.
Once a client is won, retention must be the long game for sustaining strong business growth. A loyal customer is better than gaining two. Even in this digital age people still build relationships on trust, which is always a fragile commodity.
Never lose sight that two-thirds of customers are willing to switch brands over poor customer experience.
A marriage made in heaven…
Once the first deal is done in the ideal world surpassing your customers’ expectations for eternity is what you want. Which we all know is not realistic in any relationship but delivering what you promise is essential to keeping up good customer relations.
Some suppliers over-promise or are not completely clear with their clients on what the deal does not contain just to win the business, or worse they start on a strong delivery and over time become complacent.
ODO is about making the truth a reality and helping the client clearly understand what we can deliver, by when and the positive benefit it will bring to their business. The aim is to strengthen the relationship through being a friendly professional organisation to deal with. This means there is a relevant consistent flow of effective communication. All good long-term relationships are formed this way.
So how do you do this without having an army of account managers out in the field with an equally large pro-active back-office…??
Well, you have taken the first step if you have invested in the right technology. The ODO team are constantly listening and talking to customers, end-users and the sector. Visibility of market trends and changes is essential in offering the right solutions to retain customers.
Embedding your technology into your client’s core process to make their life easier will allow you to do more with the same resources and increase your recurring revenues.
Managing the real frontline demand with the ODO driver App, to proactive dashboards helping prevent issues, agile workflow allowing hierarchical process automation and effective internal and external messaging with automated escalation will ensure nothing in the client engagement gets overlooked.
Are you listening effectively…?
2020 brought with the Lockdown some dramatic changes to how we all interact. The digital experience became king and the customer experience is a top strategic priority for driving growth. The problem for most companies executing the strategy correctly without the right technology is going to be difficult.
Getting the right client feedback data is difficult if it is not automated within your platform. Having the ability to react quickly to identify the real trends, and track the burning needs is vital to stay relevant to your clients.
Today Social media keyboard warriors can destroy a brand’s reputation with a single bad review, and customers seem to be increasingly swayed by one vindictive action. Client retention is both more demanding and more crucial than ever. Keeping on top of responding fairly and calmly to negative commentary is imperative. It is still important that your response is persona-driven especially when the criticism is often anonymous.
How retentive are you?
Your clients build relationship trust with your team, recognising the significance of each member of your client-facing team is so important. A team that values each other and takes their joint responsibility seriously as well as having fun gets noticed by your clients when they interact. High value and volume customer service needs a familiar and happy and connected team to deliver. Celebrating each person’s efforts, achievements, and hard work helps us to become a better team. And better teams provide better service.
Use digital automation to keep you relevant to your clients but use the following seven points to underpin it.
- Get Customer Feedback often! Make it easy and fast. Your clients are busy too. Maximum 5 overall experience questions.
- It has to be instant. Engaging for customer feedback needs to be as soon as possible after an interaction by email or SMS. While it is still fresh. The response rates will be higher and more accurate.
- Tie experiences to specific areas of the business or service. If there has been a human interaction get your customers to reference the specific employee they dealt with. This is excellent for getting the client to feel good about your business and getting measurable, actionable data on how you are performing as a team.
- Identify employees who amaze or alienate customers. It can really help you improve and prevent an escalation. It can also help define training and potentially identify gaps in your service and systems. Fast issue resolution supports good retention.
- Gamification incentives for good performance can really drive team members to excel. Especially if they have to handle difficult issues or complaints.
- Look for trends instead of isolated incidents. This will help focus on what may be an emerging market change and stop an overreaction to a difficult customer or issue.
- Be slick to Intervene instantly! The competition is waiting for you to fail and customers will abandon your brand quickly, so it is paramount to respond to their issues immediately.
The age of AI and machine learning is here, ODO started from a vision with its own mantra of, “Customer Service Digitally Automated” so nothing gets missed in the human connection that supports your business client retention policy.
It’s time to renew.
