While you may be offering a great service, that alone isn’t always enough for customers to stay loyal to you.
In fact, research by SuperOffice shows that the number one reason a customer leaves a company is because they believe that the company doesn’t care about them. That applies to a staggering 68% of customers who leave.
Good customer service develops customer loyalty, so what steps can you take to improve retention, which KPMG describes as the single most significant revenue driver?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a fantastic tool for sales and marketing teams and can be put to great use towards improving customer retention. If you need a reminder as to what a CRM is, it’s software designed to help you organise and maintain up-to-date information about your customers.
By offering sales professionals and marketers a more comprehensive view of their relevant customer data, CRMs can allow you to generate and progress sales and ultimately provide a better service to your customers.
You may already be aware that a CRM is extremely valuable for connecting with your customers, building out existing relationships, tracking customer interactions and recognising sales opportunities and potential leads. What you may not know is how to utilise a CRM to improve the retention of your customers.
Learn More: CRM Systems - Which one is right for you?
Learn More: How Brokers can increase Customer Retention
The ‘R’ in CRM stands for relationship, and that’s the key. A relationship is something you develop with your customers over time and a CRM will help you develop a greater understanding of your customer as time goes on. The more you are able to understand your customer as an individual, and the more you are able to interact with them on an individual basis, the better your relationship can be.
So what can you actually do, with the help of a CRM, to impact customer retention?
Utilising surveys, polls and other direct feedback opportunities means you can listen to what your customers want to say. One of the great benefits of a CRM is that having accurate and updated data to hand allows you to hugely decrease the level of guesswork involved in your strategy.
With the help of CRM data, you can demonstrate to each customer that you do understand them, and do care about them. Once data has been collected, you can use that data to provide customers with targeted, relevant information and offers which they have a higher chance of engaging with. You may want, for example, to send a different message to your customers whose mortgages are due to mature than to those who have recently remortgaged.
Customer retention is as much about stopping customers from leaving as it is about making them stay. Often those customers who are at risk of moving on from you will display signals of their intentions. This might show through the nature of their recent customer service enquiries or a change in frequency of those enquiries. The specific metrics by which to measure your customers’ happiness will differ, but with a CRM in place you’ll find it easier to keep track of them.
Think about the services your customer doesn’t need today but could benefit from in the future. The earlier you start the conversation around, for example, remortgaging for home improvements, the more time it gives your customer to consider the idea. In hand with the data your CRM can retain on your customers, you can be more sure that you’re suggesting the products that will spark the most interest from them.
Keeping to your promises around follow-up calls and appointments is essential to maintaining your professionalism and demonstrating that you value your customers’ time. CRM allows for automatic scheduling and monitoring of appointments to make sure you never miss a call. This is especially useful during key times of the year like March, or between September and November.
CRM tools are great for minimising the leg work. Utilising automation is a no-brainer. Trigger-based events, for example welcome emails and confirmation responses, can demonstrate a 5x higher open rate and 15x higher click-through rate than their standard counterparts.
Learn More: How to build relationships as a broker
There is so much that can be achieved through the use of a good CRM. The main goal of customer retention is keeping your customers happy and engaged in order to keep them loyal to you and your business and ultimately deliver the best outcome for all parties. You should be using all of the tools at your disposal to achieve that.
Learn More: How Brokers find value in a CRM
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