To retain impossible to lose

Yevheniia Kyrylenko, head of customer relationship team of Sigma Software, describes how to understand that the customer may refuse from your services and what you can do to retain such customers.

Customer retention is one of key aspects of a profitable business successful development. The expert believes that each business striving to develop should ensure fruitful interaction with their customers. Unfortunately, it happens that the customers may leave, and they do it for different reasons. To understand why the business loses its vital force, Yevheniia Kyrylenko recommends to learn from own mistakes and find out from as many as possible customers why they leave you and why they took such a decision. You need to record all the listed reasons, range them and develop a retention strategy.

We should highlight the following universal aspects that to some extent may lead to refusal from cooperation with your company:

• consumer has not received value from the product/services – it has not solved his/her tasks;
• consumer’s expectations were not met;
• bad customer service;
• price (there may be a range of different variations).

Yevheniia Kyrylenko advises to focus only on those reasons of customer outflow that may damage the business the most. You can please everyone at once but in such a case you should pay your customers for the use of your product/service or you will have to operate on a voluntary basis.

Customer loss indicators 

“Convincing the customer that already decided to leave is a very difficult, long and expensive process. At the same time, acquisition of a new customer is 5-10 times more expensive than the retention of the existing customer and it is possible to prevent the loss of such customers. The most important thing is to notice the indicators showing that the “escape” is intended”, Yevheniia notes.

You can speak about a potential loss if your partner-consumer:

• starts to order less;
• stops responding to messages or the communication becomes less regular;
• expresses openly his/her discontent or does this more frequently than usually;
• is actively interested in competitors;
• is not engaged with the product – does not use it and only pays for it.

If you noticed any of these indicators, you should be concerned and prepare a consumer retention plan.

Customer crisis

What should you do if the crisis with customers begins in the company? Yevheniia gives several pieces of advice in this context depending on the different nature of situations that may bring about such crisis.

 “If you have no customers, you should try jointly with the sales team to generate leads (look for leads). In this case a key task is the creation of the customer base.

If the customers are leaving in large numbers, you should not try to retain every customer, but try to retain as many as possible top customers providing the major part of the company’s profit. Then you should gather statistics, analyze reasons, develop plan of the situation improvement, the expert emphasizes. The third type of situation emerges when the external environment makes the cooperation of customers with you impossible. You should remember that today everyone endeavors to adapt to the new reality and if your partners belong to the industries which Covid-19 affects the most, I recommend to make certain concessions for such customers, for example, offer a discount. It may help to retain a customer in the long run”.

Rules of customer retention

The most important thing for retention is customer-centricity. It means that you should not emphasize how great your service or product is, but how they will help consumers of your goods or services in the development of their business. Furthermore, the retention of customers is also economically viable. According to the data of Harvard Business School, the increase of customer retention rate by only 5% increases profit by 25-95%.

To understand consumers better and retain them, Yevheniia advises:

For В2В (Business to Business):

• to analyze a primary request of the customer and check how you further satisfy it;
• to understand the strategy of the partner’s development and plan how to fit your service/product into this strategy;
• to set common goals for the future, regularly measure their progress and review them, if necessary;
• to draw a map of communication and decision taking by the customer, it is important to take into account the interests of all stakeholders;
• your customer servicing team shall be top-of-the-line.

For В2С (Business to Consumer):

• Your customer support team is the face of the business. Qualification, customer-centricity, positive spirit of the team are the key aspects of sensible consumer retention;
• You should automate manual work, for example, invoices generation. It will save your time and partners will receive the required information and help in time.
• You should improve your reputation, В2С customers are eager to leave a positive review in social networks, which will help to attract new customers and retain the existing ones. Who would leave the best partners?

We hope that these rules and pieces of advice will help you to retain customers and increase their loyalty and your income.