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Companies are looking to CRMs for customer retention through the use of personalized offers, incentivized gaming and platform integration. Here we discuss how top companies have used their CRM software in these three cool ways.
Your customer retention tool should be a CRM. These tools help you to keep your customers engaged and happy. They also provide insights into the lifetime value of your current customers, which is important for determining how much money you are spending on customer acquisition vs. customer retention. Read more in detail here: how crm helps in customer retention.
Engaging with consumers, tracking their habits, and knowing how to enhance your company’s customer experience are all effective customer retention techniques. Since of the functionality offered via built-in tools or third-party connections, customer relationship management software (CRM) is a critical component of any strategy because it allows you to organize customer data, record conversations, and evaluate activity.
Here are the top three client retention tactics that may be improved with the use of a CRM system:
1. Give Your Customers More Power
Empowering your consumers is the process of providing a better experience for them by showing that you respect their feedback, customizing their service, and rewarding your most loyal customers. These strategies need paying attention to what consumers have to say and keeping track of their actions. With 73 percent of consumers stating their experience as an essential buying determinant, empowerment via customer experience leads to increased customer retention.
Customer satisfaction surveys are a great method to find out what your customers think, and a CRM can help you build and distribute them. For example, HubSpot enables users to generate surveys inside the CRM system and distribute them to one or more clients in the database. Survey distribution may be automated using triggers such as the purchase of a certain product or the amount paid lately by a consumer.
Customer feedback tools from HubSpot (Source: HubSpot)
In this HubSpot CRM review, we’ll show you how HubSpot can help your company communicate with customers and arrange sales transactions.
Another method to listen to your consumers is to look at what they’re saying about your company on social media, or what they’re saying directly to you. The Zoho Social feature, which companies can use with their CRM to create content, monitor postings, and send direct messages on their social network channels, makes this feasible.
Because 20% of consumers will use social media to complain about bad service, and if companies fail to reply to clients on social media, customer turnover may rise by up to 15%, it’s critical to monitor social media activity for retention.
Social media monitoring tool Zoho CRM (Source: Glion Consulting)
In this Zoho CRM review, you’ll learn more about Zoho’s social listening features and how its CRM may help you manage your sales process.
A ticketing system is used by several CRMs to handle customer support. Customers’ service tickets for account maintenance or product or service help may also be used to collect feedback. Bitrix24, for example, provides a queue-based system that allows service representatives to choose the next ticket in the queue as well as the contact method they want to employ to resolve any client concerns.
Find out more about the features. In our Bitrix24 CRM review, we look at what Bitrix24 has to offer sales teams in terms of improving client retention and tracking sales prospects.
Connecting with a company and maintaining a loyal client requires using the consumer’s chosen contact channel. In fact, 31% of consumers consider the ability to contact a firm through any communication channel to be the most important factor in connecting and sticking with a brand.
Customer service line at Bitrix24 (Source: Bitrix24)
Surveys, social media monitoring, and ticket feeds should all be utilized to obtain meaningful information to improve the customer experience. Customer feedback, for example, might indicate opportunities to enhance a product or service, expedite customer assistance, or solve other customer journey pain points.
Personalizing your consumers’ user experience is another way to empower them. By tailoring a client experience, your company demonstrates that it is interested in what the consumer wants and is eager to provide value for it. Targeting offers based on particular consumer habits is a frequent technique to achieve this.
BigCommerce is a customer relationship management (CRM) and ecommerce software that tracks client category affinities, or the goods they commonly look at. This information may be used by your company to deliver tailored promotional offers.
Customer profile on BigCommerce with a section on category affinity (Source: BigCommerce)
Consumers may also be empowered by rewarding loyal or VIP customers. Customers’ devotion to a brand is recognized and appreciated when loyalty is rewarded. In fact, if consumers believe there is no reason to stay loyal, 30% of them will transfer suppliers.
Your CRM system may be utilized to handle customer loyalty programs and customer history to determine whether they qualify as VIPs once again. CRMs may be set up to automatically give customers reminders about their loyalty points balance, how to utilize them, and what they need to do to keep being rewarded.
Lightspeed Retail is a customer relationship management (CRM) and point-of-sale (POS) system that allows your company to maintain client history, loyalty points, and store credit in order to provide prospective incentives and promotional deals. If your consumers know they’ll be treated like VIPs, they’ll be more inclined to stick around.
Page for managing Lightspeed Retail loyalty programs (Source: Lightspeed)
2. Use data to improve the customer experience
Customer retention may also be improved by using the customer data collected by your CRM to improve the customer experience. Real-time data may provide information about your customers’ origins, what they’re purchasing, how lengthy their sales cycles are, and descriptive information like a lead’s job title or industry.
When you begin to see patterns in data trends, you may utilize that knowledge to forecast future demand, enhance inventory management, and optimize recruiting to have more service agents accessible for consumers and during certain times. CRMs incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) features can assist firms in identifying and analyzing patterns. When users ask their AI assistant Zia questions, for example, Zoho detects patterns and presents them to the user.
Page of Zoho Mobile AI Zia Questions (Source: Zoho)
For data reporting and analytics, Salesforce is one of the most popular CRMs. It contains data on current sales possibilities as well as other customer data such as payments, service tickets, and communication history. The Salesforce billing reports dashboard, for example, displays how customers pay and the reasons for failed payment transactions.
According to your CRM data, a large percentage of your consumers prefer to pay using a certain way. Knowing this, you may invest in solutions to modernize their payment gateways, which will improve the customer’s payment experience. After all, 80% of customers believe that speed and convenience are the most crucial aspects of a positive customer experience.
Dashboard for Salesforce data reporting (Source: PacktPub)
In this Salesforce Essentials review, see how Salesforce Essentials, the CRM plan designed specifically for small enterprises, can help your sales staff interact with clients and guarantee no transactions or leads slip through the cracks.
CRM data may be utilized to provide excellent customer service and to optimize sales choices such as which lead sources to prioritize and which leads to allocate to certain sales representatives. Check out our post on the sorts of data you should have in your CRM for additional information on how to utilize data in your CRM.
3. Maintain Consistent Customer Engagement
Consistently engaging clients entails talking with them about items that may be of interest to them, such as forthcoming promotional events and new goods or services, as well as checking in with them to ensure they are satisfied with what your company has to offer. Consistent contact has been shown to boost client retention, with a firm reaching out to a customer on a regular basis preventing 11 percent of customer turnover.
For various reasons, a CRM is an excellent tool for keeping in contact with current clients. Your CRM can quickly send emails to clients using email systems like Gmail and Outlook, which has been shown to be 56 percent more successful for customer retention than any other contact strategy. CRMs may also work with third-party apps like Mailchimp to develop and send promotional emails on a regular basis.
Pipedrive, for example, interacts with Gmail to send bulk emails through the CRM system while also centralizing all client contact information. For organizations who seek an easy-to-use platform for automating the process of sending promotional emails to keep consumers engaged, Pipedrive can also link with Mailchimp.
Gmail connection with Pipedrive (Source: Pipedrive)
Read our Pipedrive review to find more about how Pipedrive can help your company connect consumers, maintain their business, and complete more transactions.
Mailchimp connection with Pipedrive (Source: Pipedrive)
Built-in design templates that organizations can employ are another way that a CRM is a terrific tool for engaging clients. Some CRMs, like as HubSpot, provide newsletter creator tools that allow users to create and deliver corporate newsletters to existing clients, keeping them up to speed on company news.
Customers will appreciate how important they are if you send them regular newsletters that keep them up to speed on business happenings. This creates a stronger emotional connection between your current clients and your company, increasing the likelihood of their retention.
Designer of HubSpot newsletters (Source: HubSpot)
One advantage of maintaining in contact with old clients on a regular basis is that it enables you to be proactive in retaining them. Customers may browse elsewhere for goods and services if your company only interacts with them when it’s time for renewal or repurchase. In fact, even after a terrible experience, nine out of ten consumers are inclined to give a company a second opportunity if they have a history of openness and proactive communication.
Why is it critical to have a CRM-based customer retention strategy?
A high customer retention rate refers to continuous, recurrent income without the expensive expense of gaining new customers via methods such as lead purchases or trade fairs. This advantage, however, is often overlooked. For example, 44 percent of organizations prioritize client acquisition while just 18 percent prioritize customer retention, despite the fact that current customers are 50 percent more likely than new customers to explore a new product or service.
A strong customer retention rate comes at a cost, but a CRM may help you save money by automating various operations related to customer empowerment, experience management, and engagement. This saves both time and money for your company.
How to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Your Customer Retention Program
The simplest approach to measure your customer retention rate is to utilize your CRM’s built-in analytics tool, however you can still calculate it manually if you have a means to keep track of how many clients you have at the start and end of a given period. More information on how to calculate client retention may be found in our in-depth article.
Your ultimate objective should be to enhance client retention rates to levels greater than industry standards and rivals, whether you utilize a CRM or manually measure it. The following are some industry averages for client retention rates:
- Customer retention rates for retailers are 63 percent.
- Customer retention rates for IT service organizations are 81 percent.
- Customer retention rates in professional service businesses are at an all-time high of 84 percent.
Industry retention standards may be utilized as a starting point for determining if your client retention is healthy or needs to be improved.
The Advantages of a CRM Customer Retention Strategy
High customer retention, aided by the right use of a CRM software system, has significant financial and brand-building implications since it indicates consumers are continuing to buy from you, growing sales, and being happy to the point where they have a favorable impression of your firm.
The following are the three key advantages of having a high client retention rate:
1. Customer Retention Is Economically Beneficial
Obtaining recurring business is considerably less expensive than acquiring new business. When you include in the expenses of sales, marketing, and customer onboarding, as well as the time spent seeking new business, bringing in new clients may cost up to five times more than keeping current customers.
2. Increased Profits from Customer Retention
Even a little boost in client retention may have a significant impact on your company’s Conclusion. According to research, clients who are satisfied with a company are 87 percent more inclined to acquire upgrades or additional services, and loyal customers spend 33 percent more on average than new customers.
3. Satisfaction Leads to Customer Retention
Remember that good client retention indicates that your consumers are happy with the services you provide. In fact, a 1% improvement in customer satisfaction may result in a 61 percent boost in client retention and a favorable brand image for your company. Poor customer satisfaction may have a significant impact on brand retention, with 34% of consumers indicating they would not purchase from a company again after only one unpleasant encounter.
Customers who are pleased with their service may also open doors to new possibilities by telling others about it. Eighty-three percent of pleased consumers would recommend your business to others, and 28 percent would submit an online review. With over 63 percent of clients checking reviews before visiting a company, ratings may make or break sales prospects.
Conclusion
Because of the cost, profitability, and brand image advantages that high retention may provide, it should be a top focus for your company. By appreciating what your existing customers have to say, enhancing their experience with the data you gather, and engaging them regularly with the omnichannel communications CRMs give, you empower your current customers. Learn more about the features that the finest CRMs for small companies have to offer.
Customer extension in crm is a way to use your CRM for customer retention. It allows you to communicate with customers, provide them with value and make sure they stay loyal. Reference: customer extension in crm.
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