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Customer retention is always the prime focus of small and large companies across the globe. With increasing acquisition costs, businesses need to play a proactive role in retaining customers.

The uncertain economy and raise in customer expectations have created a greater need to strengthen customer relationships and maximize customer retention. Customer profitability tends to increase over the life of retained customer and it is an added incentive for company to allocate more resources to sharpen customer retention strategies.

Before you go through the tips and strategies to improve customer retention, you should know why your customers leave you. Some of the reasons why customers leave you are –

• Unhappy with the quality of your customer service
• Unsatisfied with your products and services
• Your customer finds that the products of your competitor are much better than yours

To improve customer retention rates, the first thing you need to do is to address the above problems. Here are some actionable tips and strategies that you can implement today to maximize customer retention.

Stay one step ahead by showing your care

Companies can make use of analytics and reporting tools to predict which customers are likely to defect based on the history, situation and behavior of customer. The use of advanced help desk solutions can make this process much more accurate and lead to a four-fold reduction in customer churn. It allows companies to take action without having to wait for the customer to complain or escalate the issue.

Approach consistently across multiple channels

Poor customer service is not only annoyance for customers, but will have a significant impact on the company. It creates poor experience for customers and drives them to your competitors. If your customer feels that he/she is not getting the answer they deserve they will try another service number of channel to seek out a desirable answer.

Offer advanced and intelligent experience

The key element of your customer retention strategy should be to ensure that your staff listens to and emphasize with the customer. The customer support representatives should be able to understand what your customer wants from their conversation with the brand and when they want to be contacted. You should choose the best help desk solution that matches the customer’s preferred platform or mode of communication.

Implement customer loyalty program

Developing a loyalty membership to your store is a way to increase conversions from your existing customers while rewarding them for their repeat purchase. It is very easy to create loyalty programs and see who your best customers are. If you are too busy to track customers, you can automate this process by choosing the best help desk software that can automatically email your customer a reward coupon when your customer chooses your product/service repeatedly. This way you can increase your team’s engagement and productivity.

Personalize your experience

Visitor’s often leave the webpages in 10-20 seconds. But, pages with relevant content hold the customer’s attention for much longer. This is where personalization comes into play. You can personalize your experience from the day a user visits your website. For example – alter the product pricing, images on landing page, promotional offers and other things to make the experience relevant to the user. This added relevance can trigger the customer’s interest and make them visit your website frequently. A big engagement comes from altering your offerings based on the customer’s behavior and retaining relevant customers.

Set customer expectations

Setting customer expectations is the first step to build better customer retention. The earlier you set the better service you can provide. By setting expectations much earlier, you can eliminate uncertainty to the level of service you need to offer to ensure your clients are happy. Customers always remember negative experiences, and if you have delivered on past 20 occasions and undelivered in one occasion, your client will quote that negative experience as a reason to end terms with your company. You can retain existing customers by setting customer expectations and fulfilling all their requirements in an effective manner.

Build trust through relationship

Customers love to do business with companies they trust. Trust plays a very important role in every business as well as helps in building good relationship with customers. You need to do some extra research and find ways to assist your customers with strengthening that point of differentiation through the services you provide. Similarly, you need to start building shared values with your clients and provide services of top notch quality.

The act of finding and obtaining new customers is always going to be among the top priorities for many companies. But, what many companies tend to forget is that once a customer makes the first purchase there is much more to be done in customer retention. Your customer is the best asset you have and focusing time on this group can be a powerful way to supercharge revenues for your company.