According to the findings of Bain & Company, a major American management consulting company, it costs 6–7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. This report attaches a numerical value to what is now common knowledge - it pays to keep customers happy.
While battling tooth and nail to gain their share of the market acquiring new clients and venturing into new markets, many companies are also increasingly becoming aware of the importance of maintaining good relationship with their existing clients.
It’s the existing clients who bring in revenue from repeat sales, market referrals and most importantly spread the word about your company among their peers.
Moreover, it is quite likely that your competitors are vying to acquire your existing client base. You miss out on catering to your clients needs and chances are they will turn their backs to you pretty soon!
Another research points out that 55% of customers would pay extra to guarantee a better service. This further reinforces the need to invest time and resources to fine tune customer service strategies.
Companies are increasingly nurturing a team of professionals earmarked to maintain client relationship. These client relationship managers are required to constantly stay in touch with their set of clients, resolving their problems and addressing their needs as and when required.
However, if everyone in your line of business is doing the same thing, how can your company gain an edge over the others? Let’s take a look at a few client relationship management ideas that are bound to increase your customer retention rate:
Retaining customers is an uphill battle and it’s the men who fight from the frontlines who make all the difference. Make sure you have the right people as client relationship executives. The first step is clearly laying down what your relationship executives are required to do.
Once you define their roles and responsibilities, you know the exact set of traits you are looking for while selecting candidates. While recruiting, the focus in most cases remains on the technical expertise of the candidates and soft skills are often neglected.
It has been proven time and again that it is the communication skills and the attitude of the employees that impact customer satisfaction.
Make sure that you hire people with strong active listening skills and troubleshooting abilities as your client relationship executives. A soft skill training for your existing employees is also a good idea to boost their performance.
The old adage of “Out of sight, out of mind” holds good when it comes to maintaining client relationship. Once you win a customer it is your job to make sure that the customer is kept aware of the latest updates in the product and service offerings.
Of course, this does not mean you bombard them with incessant emails and phone calls. Most people find such tactics quite annoying and if you do so, chances are that soon your mails will end up in the spam folder.
The key to success here is the timing. Time your mails and calls such that your company’s offering and their needs align. Keeping your company blog active is another easy way to keep customers updated.
Also the content of the communication must be clear and precise. Invest time to script a message that will evoke an interest in your clients.
Get clients who are happy doing business with you to do the talking. Over the years, word of mouth has proven to be the most effective channel of creating goodwill. Prospects are more likely to trust your company if they hear someone like them speak your praise.
Internet has made it easy to get feedback and testimonials. To add some personal touch, you could organize a face to face gathering of your loyal clients and apprise them about the recent happenings in the company. Eventually, ask if they would be willing to be part of a case study or shoot a short video testimonial.
A lesser expensive way to engage your clients would be to send them a questionnaire email and build a case study based on the answers they give. You could also use social networking to stay in touch with your community of trusted and loyal clients.
In an era where companies of all sizes are busy designing customer loyalty programs, handing out purchase reward points and discount coupons to appease their customers, it makes perfect sense for you to do the same.
Know as much as you can about your customer. Their buying cycle, purchase patterns, budgets, anniversary dates and so on. These details can then be collated in a sales management software for planning your communication with them well ahead of time.
The first step for this is of course is to build a detailed customer database. Keep a record of all the information available about your clients, be it their birthdays or their son’s birthday.
You never know when you may come up with an opportunity to pitch your products! Moreover, a simple greeting on their anniversary or a message congratulating them on the new house they purchased can go a long way to make them feel special.
According to White House Office of Consumer Affairs, happy customers who get their issue resolved tell about 4-6 people about their experience. Companies tend to lose out on their existing customers because their complaints were not resolved in time.
A quick and timely redressal of customer grievances will bring in rich dividends. Make sure that you have a proper mechanism of lodging queries and complaints in place where your clients can express their grievances easily.
Regularly monitor for any complaints that are reported by many and work on a solution. Make sure to resolve a problem as soon as it crops up. If you don’t nip them in the bud, you may lose out your clients in the long run and they might take it up on social networks, making the situation far worse.
The modern day marketplace is subject to constant changes. Be it the client’s requirements, his preference or the products that your competitors are offering, everything is constantly changing.
In such an environment, it is advisable to keep track of new trends and changes so that you can prepare yourselves. Invest in resources to revise your product offering and redesign your products to cater to the new demands.
Keep yourself abreast of new trends so that you can seize the opportunity to serve your customers before your competitors make a move. Meeting your client’s changing needs, is a strong indicator that the company cares for them.
Lastly, it’s your employees who make all the difference when it comes to retaining customers. Therefore, it absolutely is essential that you instill a culture of superior customer service and right attitude amongst your employees.
This is when building a customer centric business makes a lot of sense. You might have hired professionals with good communication skills as customer relationship executive, however, without the right attitude they might not prove to be effective.
Set down key responsibilities and clear parameters of performance measurement to enhance their efficiency.
It is true to a great extent that how an employee treats the clients reflects on how the organization treats him in the first place. If you can instill a sense of responsibility and loyalty amongst your employees you are sure to have more satisfied clients!
