7 Customer Retention Strategies for Companies

Business world is witnessing all new trends these days. The practice of making new customers is replacing with retaining existing customers; reason being the cost involved in the two processes. It usually costs around 5 to 6 times more in making new customer than retaining a customer.

A research came up with basic three reasons as to why a customer may leave you. They are:

• Unhappy customers because of the services they receive: 68%
• Customers’ decision to try one of your competitors: 9%
• Unhappy customers with the program/service they have: 14%

Below, you can find 7 basic customer retention strategies that you can implement in your business.

1. Increase your expertise: If you wish to retain your valuable customers, then you need to be an expert in your field. For decreasing customer’s trouble and increasing your customer’s loyalty, you have to become a trusted advisor for your customer.
2. Make customer feedback surveys mandatory: Listen to your customer; this will in turn decrease the number of customers leaving you. Make your customers to fill in their feedback forms, so that you can learn how your customers are seeing your service.
3. Do not make a strict limit on the service you offer: To build a strong relation with your customer, feel free to go extra mile in the services. With the emerging competition, your customers will trust you more if you do not step back in going little above and beyond. You can build a long term relationship with your customers.
4. Start practicing anticipatory service: A company that follows anticipatory service, instead of letting problem to happen, can eradicate problems before they occur. A proactive approach towards the customer is basically an anticipatory service. Example of one such proactive approach is when a flight delayed message is sent to the customers proactively by an airline company.
5. Customer’s expectations are priority: To retain your customers, you need to meet the customer’s expectation on priority. In fact, the earlier the better; do not let your customers wait for you. An important thing to keep in mind is that it is common human tendency to remember negative experiences. So be ready for the negative feedback from your customer if you have undelivered customer’s query once, even after attending him 20 times before.

Always try to meet customer’s expectations as early as possible.

1. Make use of automation: Instead of relying on human resources, make sure to use the latest automation tools in your business. These automation tools help you in doing time consuming tasks quite early. Nowadays, all companies send contracts to their customers promising a trustworthy and reliable service. After implementing automation, companies can better meet their commitments.
2. Build relationships online: With the rise of social media, why not build a relationship with the customer while he is actually looking into his computer screen. Make your profiles on the most widely used social sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

The above seven customer retention strategies will help you in boosting your bottom line along with your strong client company relationship.