"Minimising customer churn is about identifying dissatisfied customers and restoring their satisfaction."
When it comes to customer retention, there are many approaches you can take. You can build customer loyalty through attractive loyalty schemes, excellent customer service, innovative customer experience journeys and bespoke offers. In practice, you see that companies run several of these projects and activities simultaneously, so as not to leave any opportunity to limit customer churn untapped. This results in an entire ecosystem of programmes being kept afloat, without knowing exactly what the effect of each individual programme is. Which actions actually contribute to customer retention? Or do some actions even have the opposite effect, causing more customer churn?
All the activities you undertake can be pointless if they are not targeted. Yet many of these activities are kept going simply because people do not know what effect they have. They have been in place for a number of years, or the person who initiated them no longer works for the company or department. This has led to the creation of an ecosystem of customer retention strategies and activities.
In many sales and marketing departments, this is jokingly referred to as ‘shooting with buckshot’, or in English ‘fishing with dynamite’ – perhaps because ‘shooting with buckshot’ sounds somewhat old-fashioned. The big question is: is your organisation fishing with dynamite, or do you know what all your customer retention activities actually achieve?
The importance of measuring customer satisfaction cannot be underestimated in this context. By regularly and systematically evaluating how customers perceive your customer retention efforts, you gain valuable insights that can help you assess and adjust the effectiveness of your customer retention strategies. This makes it possible to invest more effectively in the activities that actually deliver results.
With askemo, you can set up a scientifically validated employee engagement survey that’s user-friendly for both you and your colleagues. No long, tedious questionnaires. Just short surveys with the highest response rate in the Netherlands. Employees can respond quickly and easily, much like sending a ‘Tikkie’.
Incoming feedback is immediately visible in HR Analytics and is automatically converted into concrete action points. You assign these to colleagues, monitor progress and request feedback on their effectiveness.
For some, minimising customer churn and increasing loyalty are one and the same. However, when it comes to measuring success, it is important to distinguish between these activities. Loyalty is about whether your customers are, or can become, brand ambassadors. Moving from a pale yellow smiley to a green smiley. These customers stay longer, buy more and recommend you to others Minimising customer churn is about identifying dissatisfied customers and making them happy again. Moving from deep red to orange to yellow, or even to pale green.
The objective, and therefore the activity, differ from one another and should therefore not be confused.
Guest blogger Berith Spoelstra is a specialist in preventing customer churn. She is passionate about retaining existing customers because it simply yields a better return than constantly chasing new ones.
Berith is the author of ‘Draaideurklanten’.
Is your organisation losing customers and are you unsure what you can do to prevent this? Then this book is a must-have for your bookshelf. Customer churn is inevitable in any business, but how an organisation deals with it can make a huge difference.
Do you want to learn why retention marketing is more than just a strategy? Why it is an art of retaining, nurturing and strengthening?
Take a look at the byBerith website.
