You need an airtight customer retention strategy to increase your profits. But you can’t increase customer loyalty without understanding why they’re leaving.

Customers tend to be fickle – hard to win over and easy to lose. They are bombarded with attractive offers all the time offering lower prices, higher quality or better service. What research has revealed is that emotion has a greater role to play in why customers leave than other factors.

The Peppers and Rogers Group found that 60% of customers leave due to perceived indifference on the part of salespeople and 70% leave due to poor service. This is why it’s crucial to understand customer attitudes.

At the end of the day, it’s much harder to acquire a new customer than to sell to an old one. Spending money on customer engagement pays off in the long run.  One of the main benefits of having loyal customers is that they tend to spread the word to family and friends – you gain customers without having to spend more money.

Save Time and Increase Customer Convenience

Problem:

Many companies waste time on tasks that could be done in an easier, more professional manner just by using the right software tools. They may even be good at finding customers but lose them because they can’t manage them properly. It’s not enough to sell them a product or service – customers are looking for convenience too. The buyers’ journey has to be as smooth as possible for them.

Solution:

Using software tools to save time means you are able to spend your valuable time on more profitable activities and focus on the big picture. For instance, customer management tools speed up customer communication and improve customer service.

Reliable targeting:

What if you could increase your lead generation and advertising efficiency by targeting only those who are already interested in your product or services? To do this, using account-based marketing can be the answer.

There are software tools available that enable you to target a specific list of companies and sort them by industry, keywords, revenue, employees, and location. This means you can directly target decision makers and key representatives.

You can also track the actions of visitors to your site so your strategies can be based on behavior analysis. With reliable targeting, you can increase your ROI.

Customer and e-commerce store management:

Customer service is becoming the Holy Grail of maintaining a successful business. Using customer service software, you can manage, organize and respond to all requests efficiently and speedily.

Software tools can help to prevent time spent on redundant tasks such as entering customer details into multiple databases. They can provide ways to import, export and synchronize data.

For example, if you are using various e-commerce outlets, such as Shopify and Amazon, you can connect all your outlets, your email provider, and ERP system. You are then able to easily upload products to stores, keep stock levels updated and the ERP system updates automatically when a purchase is made.

Proposal templates:

One business activity that can take up time is business proposals. Using software tools to help you with your proposals means that formatting is taken care of and the design looks perfect on any device. You simply choose a proposal template to suit the client and customize it for your purposes.

These are many software tools available to help you manage your business efficiently and make sure your customers have a seamless customer experience. Today you can find software tools to help you with communication, accounting, e-mail marketing, project management, workflow automation, sales and much more.

Never Stop Giving Your Customers Options

The problem:

Customers often sign up for a free trial of a product and don’t go any further. When customers have made up their minds to cancel a paid subscription, it’s difficult to stop them.

The Solution:

A relationship with a customer is worth keeping, and you want to know that you’ve made every effort to sustain it. In a subscriber-based business, it’s much easier to retain existing customers than find new ones. Analysing past data, such as payment history and customer engagement may help you to segment users into groups so you can predict customer churn by what they do or don’t do.

Everyone who signed up in the first place did so because they were engaged and you may be able to bring them back to that moment. Help them to perform a task, show them a new function or offer some perk. It may help to offer a customer a few different detours such as:

  • I would like to extend my trial (extends a user’s trial for another 14 days).
  • I don’t have time to use it (cancels the account and redirects a client to services page).
  • I would like a discount (applies a 5% permanent discount).
  • I want to cancel (cancels account and redirects user to the home page).

We found that offering customers these detours made us money we would have lost if they had simply unsubscribed. When we looked back at the numbers after using these detours for two years, we wanted to see how many people chose a detour over canceling, which option they chose and how much money this made us.

We discovered that 325 people out of over 2000 who canceled chose to use the detour options. Out of those, 100 ended up spending a significant amount of money (almost $17K).

We found that a high amount of people, 271 out of 325, opted to extend their trial. For some people, 14 days may be sufficient, but it appears that many people need longer. What may be helpful is to use in-app extensions. You lead with one trial, but you have the option of being able to segment customers and offer a trial extension to those who aren’t ready to commit yet.

(Source: lesschurn.io)

Those who wanted to extend their trial did not have a high conversion rate, but because most people went for this detour, it eventually brought in $15,532, the most revenue of all the options. Relatively few people chose the discount detour.

The highest amount paid after choosing the discount detour was $803. This is why it’s better to have different detour options available – because you don’t know which one could have the most impact. Imagine if someone canceled because they simply didn’t get enough time – a lost opportunity for you

You need to have a very clear overview of what’s happening with your subscribers.  If they’re on the point of deciding to leave you, they should be given other options. When customers provide feedback on cancellation, you need to take it seriously as you could use this information to prevent other people from unsubscribing.

Outsource to Experts where Necessary

The problem:

Many companies do not have the time, resources or expertise to use manage all aspects of running a business and keep their customers satisfied. They try to do it all, and it’s often the customers who suffer in the process.

The solution:

Outsourcing enables you to make use of the expertise of others to make sure your customers’ needs are being met and frees up time to be spent in areas where your expertise counts.

Outsource website design:

If your website is poorly designed, you won’t be able to compete with all the other well-designed websites that offer a great user experience. People may come to your website, but they won’t stay.

Outsource social media and content marketing:

Many social media marketing agencies offer skilled social media managers or social media assistants. They learn all about your brand and then find and create the best content to share with your audience. You still have control over content because you need to give final approval.

Outsource digital marketing:

Digital marketers are able to help you with everything from brand development through to inbound marketing.  With help to develop landing pages, mobile apps and much more, you remain on top of the game and cater fully to your customers changing needs.

Outsource lead research:

When your teams are focused on lead research, they don’t have the time to spend on high-value activities that increase revenue. Companies offering this service use trained professionals to take care of lead research and all you need to do is to provide them with an ideal customer profile.

Increase Employee Productivity and Teamwork

The problem:

Statistics show that negative interactions with business employees are one of the main reasons why customers choose to leave a company.

(Source: Gallup)

The solution:

Creating the right company culture and employing, training and retaining the right employees is essential to a successful, profitable business.

An effective onboarding process is critical to your company growth. It helps to reduce employee turnover, increase productivity and smoothly integrate new employees with your team. An onboarding audit can help you to make sure that your process is working the way it should. Once they’re settled in, you can use many different productivity tools to train them and encourage accountability.

By using employee surveys, you can get continuous feedback from your employees, creating a happier, more transparent workplace When you increase employee engagement, it results in a positive company culture which reflects in increased customer satisfaction.

Improve Customer Engagement

The problem:

Unless you engage with your customers and encourage their loyalty, they will quickly move on. If you seem indifferent to their needs, there are plenty of other companies who do not take a customer’s loyalty for granted.

The Solution:

To stand out from the competition, you need to know as much as possible about your customers. There are various ways you can learn more about your customers, such as getting them to complete surveys. Once you know more about them, you know what they appreciate, and you can begin to grow your relationship with them and offer them what they value.

Conduct surveys

Many web-based software tools help you to build your own surveys, forms, and quizzes. You can then share them on social networks, on your website or by email. You can filter collected data based on the answers and generate and export reports for more advanced analysis.

Use mobile apps

It’s not enough to just have a website that is mobile-friendly. You need a way to provide your customers with all the information they need quickly and effectively, and a mobile app offers you this option – information about your special offers or promotions will be right at your customers’ fingertips. People spend a large amount of time on their mobile devices and without utilizing this time, you are losing out.

If you don’t know how to create a mobile app for your business, get help from a developer. A well-designed mobile app performs actions quickly because data is usually stored on the mobile device while websites use web servers.

Mobile apps also save time by storing user preferences and acting proactively. With a mobile app, you can provide value, improve engagement, build brand recognition and encourage customer loyalty.

Create an affiliate marketing program

You want to create an affiliate marketing program because you know this is a powerful way to get your loyal customers to help grow your business for you but you have no idea how to go about it.

You can use software to create an affiliate program and integrate it on your website, so customers can start referring your business to family and friends. Integrating your referral marketing enables you to track and pay affiliates easily.

Use live chat

In traditional stores, people are able to find a salesperson and ask for help. In online stores, this is not possible. When customers can’t get the help that they need to make a decision. They will become frustrated and go elsewhere. With live chat available on a website, this frustration can be prevented. As soon as a customer goes to a website, an agent pops up to assist you and answer any questions.

Conclusion

Unless you engage proactively with your customers, they’re unlikely to stick around when so many other companies are doing their best to lure them. There are numerous ways you can engage with them and improve the ways you do business with them.

Outsourcing offers you the opportunity to make use of expert knowledge so you can use your expertise where it matters most. Many software tools enable you to save time and increase efficiency which always benefits your customers.

From the way you welcome a new user, how you introduce your products or services to in-app messaging announcing a new feature, every move you make counts and can either draw users in or push them away. You should never allow customers to leave without trying your best to retain them.

The customer experience is about so much more than getting sales – it’s about them feeling heard, getting answers to their questions, having their problems sorted out and feeling connected to a brand.

Find ways to reward their loyalty, and you will see the benefits. When you gain their loyalty, they become brand ambassadors for you and you have the potential to grow your business. You give them something meaningful beyond a sales pitch – a great experience that’s consistent from end-to-end.

About the author: Dave Schneider is the founder of LessChurn, churn reduction app. In 2012 he quit his job to travel the world, and has visited over 65 countries. In his spare time, he writes about SaaS and business at DaveSchneider.me.