Four Steps You Can Make To Reduce Customer Churn

Do you want your business’s bottom line to get a big boost? Easy. Make a concerted effort to reduce customer churn.

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. And if you want to keep your business alive, you have to take the necessary steps to foster loyalty in your customer base.

In fact, according to Bain & Company, it is six to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.

That’s not to say that you shouldn’t exert some effort into recruiting new customers. If you have sound customer retention strategies in place, every new customer you recruit can potentially offer a lifetime value that will significantly impact your ROI in the long run.

Here are four steps you can make in order to reduce customer attrition.

1. Provide support round the clock

With the rise of multichannel services and social media platforms in the last several years, more and more customers are expecting businesses to be available round the clock.

Simply put, availability issues can have a lasting impact on how customers perceive a business or service.

If, for instance, a customer experiences connectivity issues on his broadband connection at 4 in the morning, being able to provide technical support right then and there not only makes a big impression, it sends the message that you care about your customers.

2. Make use of call notes

If a customer makes a follow-up call over a similar issue only to end up being asked to repeat himself again, chances are he’s going to entertain the notion of switching to another service.

Why? For starters, customers don’t want to feel like they’re being treated like cogs in a machine. They want continuity, and they’ll appreciate the service more if the context of every call reflects that continuity.

By integrating CRM with phone systems, your call center can keep track of customer logs and conversation details.

This approach keeps customers engaged, which will, in turn, instill loyalty in your brand.

3. Offer proactive support

If you want to inspire loyalty among your customer base, you’d do well to take a proactive approach in customer support.

What this means is that you have to identify and resolve customer issues even before they occur or become apparent.

If you’re worried about being a “bother” to customers by being proactive, it’s high time that you put your worries to rest.

To bring home the point, a study made by inContact discovered that 87% of customers are happy about being contacted proactively by companies concerning customer service issues.

4. Reduce customer waiting time

Customers don’t like being made to wait on the phone.

A study made by Arise in 2017 discovered that two-thirds of customers are willing to wait two minutes or less while 13% said that “no wait time is available.”

Considering how current technology has diminished our attention spans in the last decade, this isn’t at all surprising.

Tried-and-tested solutions that can reduce customer waiting time include addressing bottlenecks on a regular basis, creating self-service opportunities, and optimizing the contact center’s system and processes.

Conclusion:

Reducing customer churn goes beyond providing exceptional service and superior products, it also involves engaging your customers in a way that nurtures the business relationship.

To do this, you have to make a constant effort to keep track of your customers’ needs and then taking the necessary steps to address them through your products and services.