Customer Experience Group

Loyalty and Retention Your former customers are talking, are you listening?

The Challenge

Things have gotten, well, tougher. You are good at what you do and have a solid customer base, but each quarter your numbers get harder to hit. It feels like your sales staff is in crisis management mode, obsessing over each and every competitor promotion. To make matters worse, some of your best customers are defecting to give those same competitors a try. Which brings about the realization—while you have a clear chain of command and associated metrics for sales, you aren’t sure who, if anyone, is minding the store with your largest asset, your installed base.

Our Approach

How do we approach these challenges?:

Our experience shows that organizations can have a distorted view of the role of price, product and service as it relates to customer churn. This distortion often comes from the sales staff which is appropriately most in tune with the pricing and products needed to land new business. Accordingly we:

• Conduct extensive research with your former customers to determine both their stated and implied reasons for leaving:
• Did you push them away with bad service?
• Did your competitors pull them away with pricing, promotions or product attributes?
• Do your customers simply shop around at normal intervals for the best value?
• Perform an extensive review on your existing efforts and data related to customer retention:
• Analyzing the ROI and incremental impact of existing retention efforts.
• Documenting your existing disconnect process.
• Examining organizational attitudes and perceptions towards churn.
• Work with you to implement quick hit initiatives:
• Discontinuing low ROI retention or loyalty efforts.
• Launching a dedicated save desk (B2C) or standardized save process (B2B).
• Establishing a permanent survey to harvest feedback from your customer disconnects
• Developing retention training to help your entire organization understand your customer’s unique churn ‘warning signs’ and how to respond.
• Establishing clear organizational responsibility, associated metrics and incentives (where appropriate) for customer retention

The Payoff

We've all heard of deathbed conversions, right? Our experience shows that gaining deep and accurate insight into customer disconnects can be transformational for your organization and its performance. Specific results that we’ve achieved:

• Immediate increase in save rate (25%) and reduction in retention spending (10%).
• Reduction in total customer disconnects of 25% upon full implementation of retention strategies, saving in excess of $300MM of annual revenues.
• Customer insights gathered became impetus for follow-on Customer Lifecycle Management initiative to eliminate customer retention issues before they start. The CLM initiatives produced another step-function reduction in customer churn.

Please Contact us to set up a diagnostic for your company.