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Customer Retention
PAGE 2
Why Do Clients Like Your Business?
First, learn why your loyal customers like doing business with your company. Look for correlations between individual factors your company is rated excellent on and overall satisfaction.
- What are the key factors leading to overall satisfaction in doing business with your company?
- What are the main factors causing customers to remain customers?
- What aspects of your service do your customers most value?
Once you learn these things, you can develop plans to strengthen these positive factors. Some marketers try to answer this themselves. They figure if they improve so-and-so, more customers will be happy. Sometimes the marketers are correct, but often, they aren’t correct and time and money are wasted implementing improvements that customers don’t really care about. Other factors are often more significant and lead to a higher ROI (Return on Investment). These are the factors you want to address. The key to your plan should be a cost-effective way to implement what your customers have told you matters most to them in retaining their business.
Why Do Clients Leave Your Business?
The other point of attack is addressing issues that drive your customers away. Sometimes a company (or its product or service) leave a sour taste in clients' mouths, so they take their business somewhere else. You want to see if your products or services have any of these bad tastes. Again, all that matters is the perception of the client, not that of the marketer. So develop a method of extracting this information from your clients. Planning how to get this information should be the focus of your first plan.
Tip: What one client says reflects only his or her personal feelings. For example, some people will love every aspect of your company while some will hate every aspect of it. Often, this has less to do with your company than with the individual. So, look for trends and shared views of the majority of your profitable customers.
With this information in hand, you’ll be prepared to develop a new initiative. Once you know what factors are key to client retention, these factors become possible measuring sticks of your plan’s progress. It’s important here to choose goals and measurements that are meaningful. At the same time, don’t choose measurements with unintended consequences. continued
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