Key Strategies for Retaining Business and Preventing Defections
By Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD
Businesses focus on sales and marketing efforts to grow their operation and make a profit. But before they can accomplish these goals, they must first make enough sales to offset the business they’ve lost.
To make this easier, wise leaders seek to first reduce customer churn.
Yet too many businesses consider customer churn as inevitable, and they make no attempt to reduce it. This is to their peril. It puts more pressure on their sales and marketing efforts just to stay even.
A wiser course is to first work to reduce customer churn. Here are some key ideas to do this.
Deliver Consistent Service
Though many assume delivering quality service is the key to reduce customer churn, that may not be true. A more critical pursuit is to deliver consistent service.
When you deliver consistent service, your customers know exactly what they’ll receive, and you’ll meet their expectations every time. It’s more important to be consistent then to pursue some grandiose goal that you’ll meet inconsistently.
The delivery of consistent service allows you to consider multiple business strategies and achieve success with them. This can include providing a premium approach, a value-added experience, or an economy offering.
Whichever option you select, just be sure to do so consistently. This is the first step to reduce customer churn
Offer Frictionless Billing
Strive to make your billing—be it invoices, sales receipts, or online acknowledgements—clear and accurate. A customer shouldn’t have to scrutinize your billing to know if you charged them correctly.
They should never wonder if they paid you what they expected.
If you find people contacting your customer service team because they don’t understand what you charged them, this means you’re probably doing it wrong.
Yes, you’ll always have some people who will struggle with this, but if you see a pattern of repeated questions, know that you need to fix these billing issues if you hope to reduce customer churn.
Provide Responsive Customer Service
We live in an age when people complain about poor customer service or the complete lack of it.
We all know people who’ve stopped doing business with companies because of their failure to correct service problems. You may have done it too.
Though you won’t succeed in solving every customer service issue, you need to at least try. Don’t rely on automated solutions or AI generated attempts to replace human interaction.
Yes, technology can help respond to customer service concerns, but treat it as a first line of defense and not the final answer.
Providing responsive customer service means having people involved. Let people help people, and you’ll reduce customer churn.
Extend Ethical Pricing
The final area that frustrates many is pricing. Do new customers pay a lower rate than existing ones? This is true at too many businesses.
Those special deals may get customers in the door, but moving them to higher prices will encourage them to leave. They’ll just go to your competitors to get the same deal that you once offered them.
Some customers do this on a regular basis, hopping from one provider to another to get their new-customer rates. You’ll never gain their loyalty—or their respect—when you do this. And you’ll likewise fail in your effort to reduce customer churn.
Reduce Customer Churn
Though you’ll never be able to eliminate customer churn, you can reduce it. The keys are to deliver consistent service, offer frictionless billing, provide responsive customer service, and extend ethical pricing.
When you do these things, you’ll keep customers longer, which means more of your sales and marketing efforts can go to growing your business and not merely struggling to maintain current levels.
Peter Lyle DeHaan, PhD, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Connections Magazine, covering the call center industry.
Read his latest book, Call Center Connections.
