The Ultimate Guide to Customer Retention

Companies today often spend so much time and focus on trying to acquire new customers, that they forget about their existing ones. Yet, studies by the Harvard Business Review show that a 5% increase in your customer retention rates can increase your revenue by up to 95%.

So, what is customer retention?

It's how effective your business is at keeping hold of customers. It's not just about how many new customers you acquire regularly, but how you keep those people satisfied and stop them from cancelling their subscriptions. With customer retention strategies, you can deliver more value to your customers, differentiate yourself in your target market, and extract additional value from your consumer base.

The Value of Customer Loyalty and Retention

Ultimately, customer retention strategies are how you transform once-off customers into brand advocates that keep coming back to your company time and time again. These plans are crucial to growing brands because they give you the guidance you need to not only attract more new customers but maintain your existing ones too.

The statistics around customer retention speak for themselves. For instance, it's up to 25 times more expensive to acquire new customers for your business than to retain one of your existing customers. What's more, the retained customers that you keep with your brand spend more and buy more often than their counterparts. Their commitment to your company makes them a valuable source of repeat revenue.

If your customer retention strategies are good enough, they may even encourage your clients to become advocates for your brand. This means that your customers will start to refer new clients to your sales team, all without you investing anything in marketing.

How To Improve your Revenue with Customer Retention Strategies

While most companies already know how important it is to hold onto their existing customers and consistently attract new ones, they don't know where to start with customer retention. The good news is that there are plenty of ways that you can upgrade your chances of customer success, including:

• Using customer accounts: Creating accounts via a CRM system for your customers will help you to gather relevant data about each client. This ensures that you can deliver a more contextual and related customer service experience - particularly if your CRM strategy links with your contact centre services.
• Offer multiple levels of customer support: Rather than just giving people the option to call you when something goes wrong, offer a multi-channel solution. Support your customer on instant messenger, SMS, and even over video. Chatbots can also provide the option for self-service opportunities.
• Create a loyalty program: Show your community that you value them by rewarding them for their repeat purchases. Loyalty programs can be highly effective at motivating customers to make continued purchases.
• Create a customer relationship marketing strategy: Think about how you're communicating with your target audience. Do you send out regular email newsletters to keep people updated on your latest offers and accomplishments?
• Track common problems: If you notice that your customers are constantly struggling to get through to the right people in your contact centre, then you'll be able to implement intelligent routing systems to boost your chances of success. Tracking common issues is the first step in eliminating unnecessary problems.
• Implement conversational AI: Invest in conversational AI tools like to support and empower your customer contact team. Artificial intelligence can help to route people to the right places in your contact centre, and even track sentiment in conversations.
• Collect feedback and act on it: Ask your customers what you can do better, and make sure that you act on their requests. Don't just ignore negative testimonials and reviews, learn from them. 
• Communicate results regularly: Make sure that it's easy for your customers to see the measurable impact that your services are having on their business. If customers can point to the benefits of investing in your solution, they're more likely to stay with you.

Don't get so focused on finding new customers that you forget to keep your existing ones. With customer retention strategies, you can outshine your competition, build your brand reputation, and improve your chances of continued growth.