A 2% increase in customer retention is equal to a 10% cut in costs. Now that’s pretty interesting for any company that’s gone about as far as it can go in paring back costs. So how can you ramp up your customer retention strategy?
While customer service might have improved in Ireland, I regularly check out service standards in hotels, restaurants and shops and there is still so much room for improvement. And the great thing about customer service is that it doesn’t have to cost a whole lot to improve the customer experience. But effort is involved. Still interested? Good, read on…
Opportunity No. 1 – Focus on customer loyalty
It is between 5 and 10 times more expensive to get a new customer than it is to hold on to one so check out your critical customer touchpoints to assess whether the customer experience is excellent across the whole customer journey, from initial contact through to post purchase customer relationship management.
Opportunity No. 2 – Close those Service gaps
You need to be scoring 9 or 10 out of 10 to build loyalty so you have to make sure your service isn’t just good, it’s got to be excellent to build positive word of mouth (PWOM)and loyalty.
Opportunity No. 3 – Be obsessed with real-time feedback
Companies that score highly on loyalty and PWOM aren’t satisfied with wishy-washy ‘how was it for you?’ feedback. They go in deep to find out how they can improve their customer experience – and this is a never ending exercise in continuous improvement.
Go fish!
