How Your Customer Service Strengthens the Customer Lifecycle?

What Is The Customer Lifecycle?

As a business owner or manager, you would know that strengthening customer relationships is an essential element for ensuring business growth and survival. Customers are the biggest asset of any company and it is important that a dedicated amount of resources are being used to get the right business tools and information. A customer goes through multiple stages of interaction with the brand before becoming a loyal member. In order to strengthen your brand allegiance, it is important to understand your customer’s journey at a micro-level by getting a deeper insight into your customer lifecycle. In the marketing world, the customer lifecycle describes the multiple stages that a customer goes through around the transaction i.e. pre-transaction, transaction, and post-transaction. Although the phases each customer experiences with their interaction with the brand might differ from one another, the five standard stages of a customer cycle include reach, acquisition, purchase, retention, and loyalty. This cycle thoroughly covers every stage of the interaction i.e. from new customers arriving at the website to clients developing long-term brand loyalty.

Role of Customer Service In All Stages of Customer Lifecycle:

Usually, the first interaction customers have with the brand is through their customer service channels and so the quality of customer service massively impacts the experience on the whole. Therefore, when looking at the customer’s lifecycle through their engagement journey it is important to regard customer service as one of the main variables. To give you a better understanding of how customer service strengthens the customer cycle for a brand, each stage is discussed in detail below:

Reach out to them- Be their Voice

The first stage of the customer lifecycle is all about creating awareness about the brand and getting people to know about your products/ services. Customers need to know about the existence of your brand for them to actually interact with you. This stage is the beginning of a customer’s relationship with a brand, and their journey towards a successful engagement at both ends. Now, to reach out to your target audience you need to make sure that your marketing material is in the right places for the customers to find because on average customers receive 362 marketing messages per day and from that lot, your content needs to stand out. In this stage, the major workload is on the shoulders of the marketing and sales departments because the customer is still a lead which they need to successfully engage for the customer service department to then take over for the rest of the cycle and ensure successful conversions.

Acquire More Customers- Respond Immediately

Acquisition is the next stage of the customer life cycle. As soon as the customer lands on your platform, the role of the customer service department activates as they have to ensure immediate engagement. At this point, the prospects are unfamiliar with your brands and they might have some inevitable questions or concerns. Providing them with quality customer assistance would help increase the chance of conversion and retention. In digital times, customers want immediate response to their queries as they not only have other available options but also because the average attention span of a customer has reduced to 8 seconds and below. This customer behavior has put a lot of extra burden on the customer service department affecting their efficiency. To mitigate this issue, brands have now started active investment in smart tools like live chat support services, that help enhance the performance of their customer support teams and ma/ake sure that the customers receive real-time engagement.

Help them purchase -Guide them through

Once the customer has gathered all the required information from your end and feels satisfied with your brand’s customer experience, the stage of conversion begins. This is the most crucial stage as it marks if the journey ends here or goes on to a successful conversion. They call it the crunch time in the customer lifecycle when the customer makes the final move towards purchasing. The role of customer support is also very significant in this stage because they not only provide them with the required information but also provide guidance regarding the transaction process. A common mistake made by a majority of the brands is that once the customer is filled in with the required information, their customer support fades away and fails to guide the clients through the whole process of buying. This is the point where potential customers are lost because of a lack of assistance. Nowadays, brands are using live chat support service and AI Chatbots to provide customers with complete assistance throughout this stage and help ensure that if there is any hurdle in the process of conversion, it can be catered to right there and then.

Retain Your Customers- Provide Extra Support and Engagement

It might appear that as soon as the customer has indulged in a successful transaction with the company, the cycle must end but it is not so because the stages that follow conversion are equally important. Retention comes after conversion, implying that a customer’s engagement with the company must not be one time only. Instead, the customer should return to the brand and engage. Retaining customers is important because attracting a new customer is seven times more expensive than keeping an existing one and it ensures loyalty to the brand. As per the 2015 Global State of Multichannel Customer Service Report, 97% of consumers said that customer service is the most important factor for them to choose to reengage with a brand. This is the stage where the consumer is establishing their lasting opinion about the band and the customer experience. Therefore never ghost your customers in this phase, rather invest in ensuring constant contact with them in the form of customer service surveys, collecting personal feedback, and sending relevant messages across multiple platforms.

Earn loyalty- Make Them Your Asset

In this stage, the customer becomes an important asset to the brand by making additional purchases. They not only re-engage with the brand themselves but also share positive reviews with their peers and sometimes on social media. Positive word of mouth is very important for every brand to gain attention and attract new customers. During the stage of loyalty, the customer has developed a certain level of comfort and satisfaction with the brand experience. They feel safe engaging with the brand and frequently indulge in broad purchases.

As seen, having efficient customer support is very important for a brand, as it strengthens its customer cycle and ensures business growth in the form of loyal customers.