thinking

The customer retention process

Written by The Clarasys Team | April 22 2016

With the buying power customers now have, it’s never been more important to consider the unique needs of your customers and offer a service which matches expectations. You’ve done a lot of great work securing your customer base, so you now have an opportunity to provide a customer experience which makes this a long term relationship.

To start with, it’s important to take a step back and question whether you’re giving the right level of attention to your existing customers in proportion to the effort to chase new opportunities. Do these feel familiar?

  • An inability to track and use feedback from customers throughout the relationship, from marketing to contract renewal
  • A culture which doesn’t appreciate the importance of end-to-end customer experience
  • Unsure how to use data and processes to support your different customer groups

Consistent Experience

To be successful with customer service, organisations need to provide a consistent, end to end, cross channel experience for all customers. So, let’s start by making sure your marketing and sales teams are communicating to your customers in a consistent way and let’s embed processes to support this.

Consistent Service Levels

Once your prospect has become a customer there shouldn’t be a drop off in the levels of service. Far too many companies focus on renewal figures but fail to ensure retention strategies are in place to offer excellent customer service throughout the relationship, not just when the contract is coming to an end. So, let’s understand your customers, make sure we stay in touch and use feedback to continuously improve.

Consistent Staff Commitment

Finally, the ethos of great customer service needs to be installed in all staff members, not just those in customer facing roles. If your employees don’t see how customer retention directly impacts their role then they don’t have the investment to make sure they are putting the customer first. So, let’s embed a customer focused culture which promotes understanding and rewards your people for retention and renewal rates.

Achieving Excellence With Help From Clarasys

To achieve great customer service you need to first understand what is happening within your organisation. Our tools and techniques help you uncover the current situation in sales scenarios from new sales, retention and renewals before helping you optimise these.

A key part of the process is understanding your data and making sure it is working for you. We’ll help you define what data is most important to delivering excellent customer service and understand the amount of effort the organisation is attributing to different customer groups to ensure the service is fully optimised.

With this knowledge as the foundation we then assist you in creating repeat business sales processes that are understood and engaged with throughout the organisation. We’ll prioritise delivery in bite sized chunks so you receive rapid value and also have the opportunity for your internal teams to learn how to ensure this value is continued far into the future.