It can be tempting to focus solely on acquisition as part of your organisation’s growth strategy, but overlooking the value to be leveraged in customer loyalty can slow or limit growth rates and revenue volumes. Customer loyalty and advocacy is an important facet of a well-rounded strategy, and there are several direct benefits this can have to your business. What is it that keeps customers returning to certain brands year after year? Delve deeper into the root cause of why customers are churning and use this information to prevent future customers from following suit - turning churn-risk customers into strong brand advocates.
While customer acquisition seems like the ultimate goal, retention is just as important, if not more. The best way to understand why, is to understand the metrics around your retention rates, such as NPS, CSAT, and churn figures, as well as the customer feedback attached to these figures to see how your customers interact with your brand and what can be done to improve them. While gaining new customers is great, maintaining them is even better.
It is important to focus on why your customers are churning and get insights into this to improve your bottom line. One way to get to the root cause is to collect leaving surveys, customer feedback and complaints data and find influential pain points that are related to a customer’s decision to leave. You can use this data to implement changes to help improve your retention rate based on evidence from real customers.
Ask yourself,
Getting to the root with data-driven answers will keep you from wasting time, money and effort on problems that won't make a difference to your customers, or to your metrics.
How do you answer these questions? Traditionally methods of getting to the answer to these questions (such as manual or statistical analysis) is difficult, slow and doesn’t provide the level of detail required to make decisions. Touchpoint Group’s AI customer feedback analytics technology, Ipiphany, overcomes these barriers to provide a simple, powerful analysis that can analyse customer comments at speed and scale. The advantage of this is to understand the pain points for leaving customers but also understanding their problems with enough specific detail so you can provide real reasons they are leaving. This way you can catch the problem before it occurs with current customers.
For example, In the insurance industry, understanding churn is not just about the price, it's also about what customers are saying about customer service. It is typically the lack of loyalty from companies towards their customers that causes them to churn. New customers often get a better deal than long standing loyal customers, and if an existing customer sees this in a company’s advertising, they’re likely to feel as though they’re being cheated, or not rewarded for their loyalty.
Achieving customer loyalty while still offering an affordable yet profitable product or service is not an easy feat. Over the past few years, we have been noticing a shift in the way customers interact with companies. When it comes to their purchasing decisions, consumers are making more conscious, values-based decisions. Customers are willing to pay up to 20% more for a better customer experience than focusing on the price as a key determining factor.
In this example customers state that they are having trouble with the call centre staff:
This is great news for customer-centric businesses; it’s not only about price but down to the loyalty the customer receives from the business. Companies must cultivate strategies that will help them grow while keeping their customers' experiences in mind. With customers willing to pay more for these values, loyalty programmes that don't require discounts can be used to drive retention and advocacy: such programmes can centralise personalisation and make customers feel 'special'.
Remember that it is easier to lose a customer than retain one. Remain true to what your company stands for while exceeding the customer's expectations. Customers are more drawn to companies where they had a positive experience. The second they have a bad experience, their perception of the business will be tarnished.
For example, when a customer is giving a business feedback on an area for improvement, the basic service is usually to take note, assure them that you will look into their issue along with a follow-up ‘thank you’ email. To exceed their expectations, a business can implement their customer's suggestion as soon as possible and send them something as a ‘thank-you’ for their valuable feedback. This shows that a company is acting on what the customers are suggesting and values what they have to say about them. Only companies that understand the customer pain points in detail down to the root cause can make a real change and achieve positive outcomes for the customer and business. The challenge? Most organisations can only achieve this when they have a sophisticated AI analytics system in place.
It is crucial to engage your customers in the moment, but it is equally crucial to keep them engaged over time. To maintain customer loyalty long term, start thinking about how you will keep your customers coming back. Ask yourself, what makes you stand out from your competitors? And what would it take to reflect your loyalty back to your customers?
In our experience - based on our extensive feedback analytics, the key is a continual focus on improving your products and services based on real customer feedback along with a competitive perspective so that you can lead on the most important attributes for your customers. This, combined with a constant understanding of their interactions through digital contact centres and face-to-face meetings gives you the opportunity to be competitive in your market, delighting customers at every stage of their interaction with your business.
Touchpoint Group offers a range of acquisition, analytics, and loyalty solutions that will help your organisation meet its goals in customer centricity. Using our products, TouchpointMX and Ipiphany, you can actively engage your customers from acquisition through ongoing engagement and retention, driving loyal brand advocates and improving customer numbers, revenue, and retention metrics. Contact us today, and we can show you how to improve your business performance while retaining valuable customers.
Source:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/09/24/50-stats-that-prove-the-value-of-customer-experience/?sh=2ca63c574ef2
Contact us today to learn how to improve your business performance while retaining valuable customers.