Many companies have already recognized that increasing customer loyalty or customer retention rate is of great importance. The more comparable the product is, the more important customer retention is for the company. For example, from the customer’s perspective, it is hardly relevant whether the electricity is obtained from provider A or B.
Pioneers in the field of customer retention, customer centricity, and customer experience are often D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) brands. They have understood from the beginning that this is one of the main topics in aligning their own brand.
Who Is Responsible for Customer Retention?
Everyone in the company! Primarily, however, every “department” in the company that has customer touchpoints along the customer journey. But above all, it’s the management and the executive leadership. If the management doesn’t value customer retention, customer experience, or customer centricity much, often the entire company doesn’t either—resulting in a lack of customer centricity. In D2C brands, it is often observed that the executive leadership itself is occasionally active in customer service, for example, to directly identify optimization potentials and understand customer opinions. Those who think in a customer-centric way do this automatically.
What do you need to do to increase customer loyalty?
Experiences & Appreciation
Surprise customers with things you wouldn’t have expected yourself. For example, take feedback on improving your own products seriously and actually respond to it. A customer feels taken seriously, valued and subconsciously develops a positive mood towards the brand. Take criticism just as seriously and ask yourself what can be done to make the best possible of this situation. There are companies that have established an internal bonus system based on the rate of change from negative to positive customer satisfaction. As a result, everyone is willing to turn a negative review into a positive one. Of course, something like this often costs money – but usually pays off twice over.
First Class Customer Service
Customer service is much more than a purely reactive team whose job it is to answer customer inquiries. Customer service is often the department with the highest customer interaction rate. Of course things go wrong sometimes – we are all human after all – but how to deal with such situations should be part of every company’s “strategy”.
Relationship Building
Use every touchpoint to strengthen the relationship with your own brand and the company. Every conversation, every chat, every WhatsApp, every email strengthens the relationship and is an opportunity to create a positive experience. But relationships are also created through well-functioning personalization.
Side Effects of a Strong Customer Retention
Many side effects are difficult to measure. But what is generally known is that companies that are very customer-centric benefit from …
Higher Reputation
The reputation and standing of the company increases because there are more satisfied customers. A positive reputation is one of the side effects of focusing on customer loyalty. Every “wow-moment” of a customer helps here!
Recommendation Rate
Customers tell 95% only about very positive or very negative experiences! Neutral experiences hardly play a role. If you make sure that the experiences are primarily positive, you will automatically increase the recommendation rate and thus boost sales.
Attractiveness as an Employer
When customers are happy, employees are usually happy, too. An enhanced reputation and brand awareness thus also indirectly lead to receiving more applications and minimizing fluctuation.
Conclusion
Customer centricity and increasing customer loyalty lead to positive opinions and reviews of the company. The positive experience leads to higher recommendation and thus also increases sales.
What you should be clear about – if you want to achieve this, you need two things:
1 – You have to really want it and transport this message to the entire company.
2 – You should be aware that the “support costs” for customers will increase for the time being. As soon as the effect takes hold, you can save costs in the long term and increase sales.
