As we continue to navigate this economic downturn, the challenge of retaining clients has risen exponentially.
To help you and your team retain as much business as possible, we held a session on the topic during this year’s Biz System’s Magic Conference.
Here’s what leaders from leading tech organizations, like Aryaka and Zendesk, shared!
Catch all of the insights from the session here.
Adopt a Customer-Friendly Business Model
If you’re looking to prioritize customer retention, you’ll need to perform customer-centric activities.
This involves getting buy-in and support from your executive team. Derek Roberts, formerly a Director of Customer Success at HubSpot, offered up an example where someone in a leadership role can proactively reach out to customers and provide updates.
Another key component to building customer centricity is flexibility. As your customers’ businesses are changing, you can offer a variety of product bundles, billing and payment options, etc. to better accommodate their needs. David O’Callaghan, Director of Renewals at Zendesk, acknowledged that employing this type of flexibility to retain customers might come at the cost of losing short-term revenue.
Measure Different Types of Actionable Data
To better assess whether or not your methods in managing customers are effective, and to put yourself in a position to take action, you’ll need to analyze the customer experience from a variety of angles. The speakers offered 3 tips that can help:
Define your metrics
You can start by taking a step back and defining the seemingly obvious terms. By establishing definitions of churn, customers, the lifetime value of a customer, customer acquisition cost, etc., you can better understand and evaluate your data.
Understand your customers
O’Callaghan recommends analyzing the pain points in the customer experience and brainstorming areas for improvement. This involves answering 3 high-level questions:
- Are your customers seeing value?
- How often are your customers using your product or service?
- In what ways are your customers using your product or service?
Though there are many more questions you’ll want to ask, these are a great place to start.
Prioritize usage data and use it to group customers
You can leverage usage data from your product to understand the health patterns of your customers. Signal to noise ratios can take time to fine tune, but they will eventually be extremely useful for your Customer Success Managers—as they can highlight the likelihood that your customers churn or extend their contract.
The speakers also mentioned that they’ve used the usage data to categorize each customer as one of the following:
- At risk
- Stable
- Expanding
Based on the category a customer falls under, your team can lead specific efforts to retain or expand the relationship.
In a time of variability, you want to provide customers with flexibility and empathy. All the while, you’ll need to rely on data when determining how you approach each relationship. Though there’s no silver bullet to improving customer retention and expansion, these tips can go a long way.
Wondering what else the speakers discussed? You can check out the full session here!
