Become Your Customer’s Favorite Brand: Top 4 Strategies for Customer Retention
What is the most critical aspect of running a business? How can a business make sure that its growth is always upward and linear? Well, Customer retention is the answer.
In today’s competitive business world, the key to survival and growth is customer experience. Businesses must thrive to provide exceptional products and services to make their customers love them and come back for more. A strategic mix of marketing and branding will help gain customers’ trust. Enhancing customer experience can help hold onto loyal customers, else they can easily sway away and turn to your competitors. You don’t want that to happen!
Customer experience must be the prime focus of every business. It mainly involves how the customers perceive your business when they discover your brand, use a product or service, interact with customer service, response and availability of the business to solve their queries, value for money, easy shopping experience, product consistency, etc.
So how can a business elevate customer experience to excel in customer retention? In order to understand the importance of customer retention, let’s first understand what it is.
What is customer retention?
Customer retention denotes a business’s ability to hold on to its customers by providing top-notch services and customer experience. It involves activities that aim to convert a one-time customer to a loyal buyer.
Customer retention rate (CRR) is defined as the percentage of customers a business has retained over a particular period.
It is calculated by deducting the new customers from the total customers over the end of a period, divided by the total customers at the start of the period and multiplied by a hundred.
Why is it important?
Research shows that customer retention costs are way cheaper than customer acquisition. Of course, customer acquisition is important, and so is keeping the present customers happy. Over time, loyal customers who trust your brand will pay you extra instead of turning to your competitors. This helps to boost the bottom line and increase profits.
Research done by Harvard Business School shows that increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases a company’s profits by 25-95%. That means low effort and high profits.
Customer retention is one of the few ways that effectively results in the growth of your business. With a strategic approach to customer retention activities, a business will scale up like never before.
Top 4 Strategies for customer retention
Businesses invest a lot of time, effort, and money in customer retention. And yet 44% of businesses fail to calculate their retention rates. You may be one of them if you do not follow these four strategies to make your customers come back for more.
1. Provide seamless services and customer experience
Your customers are a vital part of the business’s growth; and their experience and perception can make or break your business. Ensure to provide the best-in-industry products and services as the quality of the work you provide will directly impact customer experience. To ensure the best customer experience it is essential to use business automation tools. These tools help to eliminate the hassle of manual work and allow more time to focus on providing exceptional services.
Picktime is one such free online booking system that takes the workload off your shoulders and manages the business efficiently. It is a cloud-based online appointment scheduling software that does more than its name suggests. Picktime provides an ocean of features to optimize your business workflow. Streamline all the business activities such as appointment booking, scheduling, customer database, payments, business meetings, team management, and more, all in one place.
Picktime is a user-friendly system that provides efficient online appointment booking, convenient scheduling, secure payments, calendar synchronization, effective team management, easy record access, and more, for FREE. It also offers a unique booking URL for your business, so that you can provide easy and convenient service booking options to your customers. With Picktime by your side, providing customers with high-standard services and driving revenue goals gets easier.
As a business owner, you know how tough managing administrative tasks manually can get. No worries! With Picktime, you can eliminate the hassle of manual booking, scheduling, and email communication (and more) to enhance customer retention. Picktime ensures seamless business operations that lead to customer satisfaction. Save time from manual and administrative tasks and invest it in customer retention!
2. Create an empathetic connection with customers
One way to build good relationships with customers is empathy. Show them that you care about how they perceive your business. Customer relationships infused with empathy will help build trust and loyalty. Look at your brand and its services from the customer’s point of view and understand their priority to build empathy between your brand and the customer. Provide value-for-money services, always-available customer support, and set realistic expectations from marketing. Empathy is the key to building lasting relationships with the customers.
“About 70% of consumers indicate that friendly customer service, convenience, and speed make them more loyal to a business.”
3. Implement customer feedback
Valuing customer expectations will directly affect business growth. Convey to the customers that their opinions matter and are being valued. It is essential to implement customer feedback as it gives insight into how the product or service is benefiting the customer. The key to finding customer expectations is feedback. Conduct surveys and provide a review section under the product or service description, so that the customers can find it easy to communicate with your business and express their concerns or experiences. Implementing customer feedback can make the customers feel that they are valued leading to an increased customer retention rate.
4. Educate and communicate with customers
You DO NOT want to leave your customers hanging on the edge after they sign up, right? Educate your customers about the further steps, after they sign up on your website, subscribe to your service, or buy your product. Customers should know everything in detail as they are investing money not just to stay confused. Provide tips and tutorials for new customers, offer emails to educate and communicate with the customers, deliver seamless customer support, and build a community of loyal customers.
Winding up!
At times, A business’s success is measured by how much money they make, but it is never as important as customer satisfaction. Customer retention is the ultimate secret of building a successful business. Use Picktime to provide smooth and hassle-free customer experiences.
