If you’re a business owner and you’re not familiar with the term ‘customer churn’, you’re probably at least familiar with the condition itself, which is basically the same as customer attrition, i.e. the loss of customers. No business wants a high churn rate, because the cost of acquiring new customers is significantly higher than the cost of retaining them. Therefore, it is highly beneficial to any business owner to devise strategies which reduce churn rate, and help to retain loyal customers. Here are two important strategies you might consider to stop the churn of your own customers.
Strengthen customer onboarding
The importance of onboarding is often overlooked by business owners, who instead focus on attempting to rescue or re-enlist customers who begin showing signs of poor engagement. The truth is, it’s far more important to rescue a customer right at the very beginning, during the onboarding stage. That’s the time when customers are typically most interested and most involved with your products and services, and are most willing to learn more about them.
If you don’t completely capture their attention during the onboarding stage, it will be much harder to obtain their interest and support later on. Given the fact that this onboarding stage is so important, you should gauge success of your own program by polling customers on how they view your products right at the time where their interest is theoretically at its peak. If you should discover that the customer rates your products relatively low, that’s the time to take action, to try and firm up customer engagement and interest at the very beginning.
Recognize the importance of a sales champion
This kind of champion isn’t like an athletic champion but is instead the individual on the customer side who was the strongest advocate for making a significant purchase. If that person happens to move on, others in that same company might have to be re-sold on the justification for the original purchase, as well as the need for continuing to patronize your company.
This can be a very difficult situation to overcome to prevent customer churn, but there are a couple ways of avoiding the complete loss of a customer when a specific sales champion has left the picture. One of the best things you can do to avoid customer churn due to the loss of the sales champion, is to periodically gauge the customer’s interest rate, especially immediately before and immediately after the champion leaves their company.
As soon as it becomes apparent that interest has fallen off because of the loss of that champion, it is the critical time to bring in a renewal representative or sales specialist who is adept at managing such situations. The key is to become aware of diminishing interest as soon as possible so that appropriate action can be taken, and a re-sell can be initiated. It might be worth your while to develop one or two salesmen in the company who have that special knack for picking up an account in this status, to revive it before interest diminishes to the point of customer churn.
At Palmetto Payroll, we want your business to be successful, and we want to help! Contact us for guidance or to learn more about the services we offer that can make running a business a whole lot easier.
