You’ve undoubtedly heard the famous statistic that keeping an existing company is significantly cheaper than acquiring a new one (so we won’t rehash it here). This fact is becoming doubly true every year as acquisition channels dry up – businesses are turning their attention away from capturing new customers, and more on shoring up their existing base.
Customer retention is crucial, yet difficult – here are 10 strategies to cut churn, drive retention and improve your bottom line.
1. All Hands Support
Fast growing SaaS companies like Zapier swear by all-hands support – that is, the entire company doing some customer support – as a customer retention strategy. The more your employees all get facetime with your customers, the better they address their needs.
2. Real-life Customer Meetings
Messaging is one thing – take the time to make yearly customer visits a regular part of your success strategy. Information gleaned from a single face-to-face meeting trumps hundreds of emails.
3. 24/7 Customer Success
Nothing chases off customers more than unreliable support – especially for business on a different time zone that has to get used to a 48-hour problem-resolution cycle. Offer 24 hour support so your waning customers can be saved at their most vulnerable points.
4. Live Chat
It’s a proven fact that live chat increases conversion rates and drives up retention (https://acquire.io/blog/7-studies-prove-live-chat-boosts-conversion-rate/amp/) – it’s worth making the necessary structural adjustments to your success team to integrate live chat.
5. Better documentation
A great product and wonderful support can still betray you if your documentation is poor. Keeping beautiful and, more importantly, well-maintained documentation is crucial to ensuring your customers can fully understand your product.
6. Reward loyalty
Rewards programs are a great way of showing your long-term customers you value their business – driving up advocacy and increasing retention. Even an established program isn’t necessary… offering features like priority support to long-term clients can inspire customer loyalty.
