Customer retention involves maintaining and selling additional products or services to existing customers. It is crucial for businesses to reduce costs associated with acquiring new customers, as retaining an existing customer is significantly cheaper. To improve customer retention, businesses should build relationships, enhance service experiences, and actively seek and act on customer feedback.

1. Enhancing Customer
Retention
By Ruben Arballo

2. What is Customer Retention?
 Customer retention is the activity of selling additional products or services to
an existing customer or client after the original transaction.
 For example:
 Car dealership selling a car to a previous customer four years later
 A restaurant who has become a favorite for a certain couple who routinely dines
there.

3. Why is Customer Retention Important?
 Without customer retention a business will continually need to replace
existing customer in order to make up for the lost revenue.
 A high rate of lost customers can signal weaknesses in the business such as:
 poor products or service
 A customer perception that the business does not care for their customers.
 Sixty percent of customers leave because they perceive the business to have
feeling of indifference towards customers
 Seventy percent leave for poor service according to Peppers & Rogers Group.
 According to Forbes, “One-time customers won’t fuel the growth of your
business. In fact, they tend to be a net drain on your bottom line by costing
more to acquire than is gained by a single sale.”

4. Customer Retention is Important
 On average it costs seven times less to retain a customer than to obtain a new
one. For every $70 spent on a new customer only $10 is needed to retain and
existing one.
 Savings is obtained from not having to persuade customers to do business with
you.
 They already know who you are.
 They have tried your products and know what to expect.
 It is not enough to have a good product. What more can be done?

5. How Can We Retain Customers?
 As marketers, business owner, and employees, it’s important to actively work
to retain customers.
 The next few slides capture a few guidelines that I have gathered from the
valuable resources listed at the end of this post.

6. Build Relationships
 People have a strong desire to be known and understood. Take time to learn
who your customers are, what their challenges are and what the would like to
accomplish.
 Position yourself as an expert and share your knowledge. Share your knowledge by
posting it your website, social media page or YouTube.
 Create a personal experience for your customer. Learn their name and use it. “A
person’s name is the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Dale
Carnegie
 Go the extra mile and beat expectations. Leave a positive impression on a
customer by doing something kind and unexpected. Like this TravelWeekly article
reported about JetBlue.

7. Remove Roadblocks
 Customers want fast, convenient and predictable service.
 Allow them to learn about you and your product at their own pace. By creating
comprehensive product content and FAQs, customers can get to know you on their
own.
 Once they have decided they are ready to purchase make it easy for them to
set up an appointment, ask follow up questions or even transact. All can be
done online.

8. Collect Feedback
 Customers want to be heard.
 Create online surveys and train customer service representatives to handle positive
and negative feedback. It will make for a better customer experience.
 Use this feedback to improve. Measuring, analyzing and using it as a benchmark to
do a better job will create even better customer experiences.
 Leverage off positive feedback by showing future customers that your goal is to
help them meet their goals. Use the feedback to create testimonials, and
referrals.

9. Delight Our Customers!
Customers are like you and me. With that in mind, we know that we also would
like to have positive customer experiences when we shop. Let’s share that
experience with our customers and strive to DELIGHT our customers with these
handy guidelines and keep them coming back!