What Is Customer Retention?
Customer retention refers to an organization’s processes and activities that aim at stopping customers from churning or switching to a competitor. Increasing customer loyalty is a key goal of any business, and contributes greatly towards sustainable growth. Despite this fact, and irrefutable evidence that existing customers are more valuable than new ones, customer retention has often taken a back seat to driving sales. But this trend is changing, especially given the rise of subscription-based business models.
Preventing customer churn is also in essence the main objective of most customer experience programs, and often the most tangible one as linking customer loyalty to revenue from repeat business and positive word of mouth is a well-established way to fund CX improvement efforts, like the development of a new customer loyalty program.
Want to know more about how we can help your CX program shine? Get in touch today.
Let’s Talk
Customer retention survey questions tend to include ways to calculate loyalty in a meaningful way, for example “How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague”, which on a scale of 0-10 gives you a Net Promoter Score®. A customer loss survey can also be a great way to understand what made a client churn. By identifying particular pain points in the customer journey, your company can work to prioritize improvements that directly impact the customer experience.
What Are the Benefits of Customer Retention?
- As we’ve already seen above, customer retention contributes heavily towards sustainable company growth
- By investing in customer retention strategies (e.g. through a loyalty program), you can increase CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) as well as your chosen customer retention statistic or metric – the longer customers stay loyal, the more they tend to spend
- Historical data from customers (behavioral data, purchase history) can really help organizations make better business decisions
- Loyal customers are more likely to act as references, generate positive word of mouth and therefore contribute towards new acquisitions
How Do You Retain Customers?
Several key strategies come into play when it comes to preventing customer churn:
- Ensure you provide great channels of communication for your customers to get in touch with you when things go wrong, in the channel they deem appropriate
- Build Customer Success strategies for your account management teams – focusing not only on customer retention metrics, but more importantly on the value your customers get from your products and services
- Put in place a Voice of the Customer program that focuses on measuring customer experience – a program that will put powerful insights in the hands of those who can take action and drive improvements at every stage of the customer experience journey.
How Does Confirmit Help Your Customer Retention Efforts?
Confirmit enables organizations to develop and implement Voice of the Customer, Employee Engagement and Market Research programs that deliver insight and drive business change. Our clients create multi-channel, multi-lingual feedback and research programs that engage customers, empower employees, deliver a compelling respondent experience, and provide high Return on Investment. For instance, we can help you create your customer retention questionnaire, tailored to your business and needs, with your business outcomes in mind.
Confirmit’s customer engagement model provides the power to listen to the Voice of the Customer, integrate it with financial, operational and free-form text data to generate powerful insight, and take action that will promote customer retention and drive better business decisions.
Interesting Links
CASE STUDY
Siemens Corporation: Bringing a Global Approach to VoC
Siemens Corporation is a U.S. subsidiary of Siemens AG, a global technology powerhouse that has stood for engineering excellence, innovation, quality, and reliability for more than 165 years. Each division within Siemens constantly looks for ways to increase efficiencies and grow its customer base.
Learn More
VIDEO
Every business’ VoC nirvana is generating a true and measurable return on investment (ROI) from their VoC program. And, every VoC software and service vendor claims to be the “vendor that provides ROI”. But, which vendor can prove it? Confirmit can prove it!
We recently worked with Forrester Consulting to analyze the total economic impact that Confirmit has on its customers and the results were thrilling!
Learn More
EBOOK
The Road to Success: Using CX to Conquer the Hearts & Minds of Customers
There are five facets of maturity that lead to sustainable success in Voice of the Customer programs. Becoming “data driven” is the goal for all organizations today. However, only 8% of businesses indicate that they use their data effectively enough to understand and address customer needs.
Learn More
WEBINAR
VoC 5 Secrets to Drive Customer Loyalty & Advocacy
The voice of the customer is louder than ever before. Are you listening? Aberdeen’s research shows that multi-modal data collection has become the new normal in capturing customer feedback. Your customers are sharing their feedback – both solicited and unsolicited – in a variety of ways.
Learn More