Business
5 Effective Strategies to Avoid High Customer Turnover
In business, the mission is simple: acquire more customers and make more sales.
Acquiring the first batch of customers is usually an exciting moment for any business owner. However, that’s only half the job. The other half is making them stay.
If any of them leave, you’ll be left wondering what you can do to lower the high customer turnover rate. After all, it costs about five times more to gain a new customer than to keep an existing one.
Don’t let a high churn rate keep you awake at night. In this guide, you’ll find a handful of practical tips you can use to address the issue.
Let’s get right into it.
1. Personalize the Onboarding Experience
There’s a direct relationship between a customer’s onboarding experience and their satisfaction level. Customers who’re satisfied with the onboarding process are more likely to stay around and try out your products and services for longer.
An effective way to offer the best onboarding experience is to personalize it. Customers love when companies put extra effort into offering them services that suit their preferences or needs.
For example, something as simple as addressing a new customer by their name in a welcome email goes a long way to personalizing their onboarding experience. Or if a customer has stated that their preferred way to be contacted is via SMS, use that method. It shows your company cares about the customer’s preferences.
As a business, you should be continually finding new ways to personalize this experience. Remember that customer preferences are always changing, and so should your onboarding process.
2. Poor Pricing of Your Goods/Services
You’re at liberty to price your products/services as you wish. However, you can’t just slap any price tag on your products. You must consider your competitors’ pricing strategy, as well as your customer’s purchasing power.
If you don’t factor in these things, your business will struggle with customer retention. The average customer isn’t going to pay just any price simply because your product is the best in the market. They want value for money, which means they’ll consider what similar products in the market are going for.
When launching a new product, research the market and establish how much your target consumers are willing to pay for your offerings. This is especially vital if you’re entering a niche market where there isn’t a competitor.
Offering attractive discounts (price cuts) to your customers can also help keep the churn rate low. Sometimes a customer will take their money elsewhere because the deal is better. Offering them lower prices can be all it takes to make them stay put.
3. Bad Customer Service
Bad customer service is bad for customer retention. A recent survey concluded that about 60 percent of your customers will switch to a competitor after one instance of bad customer service.
Now, you wonder, what’s bad customer service?
A rude or unbothered customer rep attending to a customer may be the first thing that flings to mind, but there are several ways a customer can be dissatisfied with your service.
Think of when a customer wants to contact your business and they can’t easily find the contact information on your website. Or if your customer service number doesn’t go through on the first attempt. Or when your business takes several days to respond to an email.
All these are subtle things that amount to bad customer service and the modern consumer won’t be so forgiving.
As you turn up your customer acquisition efforts, ramp up customer service as well. Hire more customer service reps as needed and ensure they’re properly trained.
Provide multiple channels for customers to contact your business, as not all of them prefer the old method of calling in. Prompt responses to customer inquiries are the key to a customer’s purse!
4. Act on Customer Feedback
It’s hardly possible to fully satisfy all your customers. Thankfully, some dissatisfaction here and there won’t shake their loyalty. They’ll, however, give you feedback on what you can do to serve them better.
Act on that feedback, or else risk losing the customers.
Taking too long to make changes requested by customers, or not making any changes at all, shows customers that you don’t care about their needs.
This also means that you ought to allow your customers to give you regular feedback. Run monthly or quarterly surveys by email, for example.
If you don’t, count on them to go to third-party sites like Facebook, Yelp, and Google to leave their reviews. You have no control over these reviews, and if they’re negative, your brand’s reputation will take a hit.
5. Utilize Customer Relationship Management Technology
Technology is revolutionizing various aspects of running a business, including service delivery. Infusing the right technology into your customer operations will open up a new world of possibilities and make customer retention easier.
There are different types of CRM software, but they all have one core goal: customer contact management. You’ll have all the data from your sales leads and customers, which you can use to refine your customer service strategies.
For example, if a certain customer goes for longer than usual to make a purchase, your CRM system will tell you. With this information, you can decide to reach out to the client with an offer that could incentivize them to make a purchase. That’s how you retain a customer!
If you’re ready to find the best CRM software for the needs of your small business, start your research at https://sumerudigital.com/.
Keep Customer Turnover Low
High customer churn rates are a nightmare for any business owner. It’s particularly worse when you keep losing customers despite your best efforts to make them stay.
However, as long as your product has good market demand, it’s not impossible to keep customer turnover low. For the most part, you just need to go back to the basics and listen to the customer.
What do they want you to improve? Do it and you’ll see a positive outcome.
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