We’ve all heard many times that it’s much cheaper to keep a loyal customer with your company than it is to gain new customers.
And this statement makes a lot of sense, after all, every cost associated with prospecting, advertising, client visits and presentations is eliminated, when you sell to a current customer.
Thus, once you know how to retain customers, your profitability tends to increase, especially if you adopt practices of up selling and cross selling.
But how do you retain customers in the company? What needs to be done to achieve this goal?
In this post, we’ll present 5 suggestions on how to reduce the customer churn rate in your business, also known as the customer loss rate.
Learn more: How The Churn Rate Calculation Can Help Your Business
How to reduce the customer churn rate in your business
Here are 5 tips for how to reduce the customer churn rate. The first is one is generally considered the most important, let’s see:
1- Don’t sell to anyone who doesn’t need it
One of the biggest causes of customer loss happens when they discover that what they purchased doesn’t meet their needs.
This can happen by accident due to an inadequate lead qualification. But if it’s an intentional act, by pushing sales at any cost, it’s unethical, and it’s a bad sales strategy.
Think about it: there’s no way to retain customers in your business if the word of mouth of unhappy customers starts spreading throughout the market.
So train your marketing and sales teams to proceed with a sale only if the solution your company offers is truly beneficial to the customer.
It’s better to lose a sale now, than to upset a customer in the future, who then speaks badly about your business.
2- On-boarding
On-boarding is the process that starts as soon as a customer acquires a product or service from your company. You then do everything to make them feel at home.
Customers needs to quickly see the value of this solution for themselves or their business. If this takes time to occur, they may find that what was promised by the seller is not happening.
So if you want to know how to reduce the customer churn rate in a way which is commonly used by B2B companies, follow your customer’s closely in the first few weeks or even months, depending on the time it takes for the benefits of your solution to be clear to them.
See more: Calculate the churn rate and retain your customers
3- Customer Success
Even after your client has realized the value of your solution, it needs to continue delivering what it promises in a sustainable way.
The results need to come, or the customer will give up on your company.
To avoid this, there is a practice for how to reduce the customer churn rate called Customer Success. This is when you create a team which specializes in tracking customer results.
In this process, you’ll eventually need to do some kind of consulting so that they succeed in their business. Help them with the correct use of the solution that your company sold to them.
See also: Retain Customers Through End to End Customer Experience
4- High quality customer service
A survey released by Harvard Business Review shows that 65% of customers who had a poor customer service experience will speak ill of a company to someone. 48% will speak badly about the company to 10 or more people.
We repeat: there is no way to retain customers with this kind of negative propaganda.
Therefore, it’s essential to have a level of customer service that meets your customer’s expectations.
Here’s how to manage customer service in this post: ITIL Service Desk Process Flow: Efficient Incident Management!
5- Continuous improvement
Your customers can be satisfied with your products/services, as well as with your attentiveness, but you must always evolve.
Business relationships and markets are increasingly dynamic and, in order to meet customer needs, we must always innovate.
Therefore, maintain a process of continuous improvement of your processes, products and services, based on the feedback of your customers.
TIP: Check out continuous process improvement
Continual service improvement: A necessity in competitive markets
Modeling service processes as well as promoting continuous improvement are the type of activities that can be strongly leveraged with the use of a BPMN tool. Get to know HEFLO, the free process modeling software based in the cloud.