Customer retention measures a company’s ability to turn first-time buyers into repeat customers. As opposed to customers buying once and then leaving to purchase from a competitor. It is the direct consequence of providing quality products, services, and support, resulting in fewer customer acquisition costs and increased sales through upselling. Various factors give businesses a high customer retention rate.
One of which is ensuring an exceptional customer service experience with Help Desk Software.
Find the Best Help Desk Software to Help Improve Your Customer Retention Rates
How Would You Like to Log Your Help Desk Incidents?
Why Customer Retention Is Important
Customer retention is a result of keeping customers for the long term. Eventually converting those first-time buyers into loyal and repeat customers. With the goal of increasing a customer’s lifetime value (LTV) to your business. Retaining customers with different strategies is essential for business growth. It helps you to:
- Improve brand presence and image
- Grow your customer base
- Reduce marketing costs
- Increase profits
Customer retention rate can be measured in multiple ways. The simplest way to measure it is to inverse your customer churn rate. But, if you don’t know your churn rate, there are other ways to measure it. You just need to know three key metrics. The first is the number of customers at the start of a chosen period. The second is the total number of customers at the end of that period. The third is the number of customers added within that period.
There are various strategies a company can deploy to improve their customer retention. Including loyalty programs, free gifts, and discounts. The result of a high customer retention rate offers several benefits. Including:
Reduced Customer Acquisition Costs
Customer acquisition can be an expensive process for companies. It costs companies between 5 and 25 times more to acquire new customers. As opposed to keeping existing ones. With most of their budget going towards marketing and advertising. By deploying help desk tools and retention strategies, acquisition costs can be reduced. Revenue can instead be used to improve customer service and deliver proactive support.
Increase Sales by Upselling
Existing customers are 50% more likely to purchase new products and services. This makes retaining buyers essential for revenue growth. Increasing customer retention by just 5% can lead to an increase in profits by 25%-95%.
Customer Retention Is Word of Mouth Marketing
Companies should never underestimate the power of word of mouth marketing. Particularly when it comes to having a loyal customer base. With 60% of customers happy to talk about their favourite brands to family and friends.
Increase Customer Retention With Good Support Experience
A key factor for improving customer retention is to deliver exceptional customer service. That means providing customers with the level of support they expect. Such as quick response times from agents and instant resolves of tickets. As well as availability across communications channels such as social media and live chat. Help desk tools are key to ensuring a good customer service experience. They help companies to:
Deliver Proactive Customer Care
A way to take customer service levels from good to outstanding is with proactive support. Proactive help comes in the form of self-service resources and AI integrations. Such as a knowledge base, FAQs, and chatbots.
Offer Self-Service Resources
Self-service resources and portals enable customers to solve issues by themselves. Something that 70% of users prefer, instead of contacting a support agent. Self-service tools are a great way to increase CSAT levels. They include a digital library containing product, service, and topical information. Allowing for round-the-clock support to customers in all forms of language.
Increase Customer Retention With an Omnichannel Experience
Help desk tools open the door to having an omnichannel experience across support channels. Meaning customer’s don’t have to repeat requests more than once. A seamless support system is proven to increase customer satisfaction. Increasing the likelihood of a higher customer retention rate.
Use Our Help Desk Software Finder to Identify the Best Tool For You
How Would You Like to Log Your Help Desk Incidents?
Provide Multichannel Customer Service
A way to improve your overall customer service experience is to provide multichannel support. This allows companies to offer assistance to customers across multiple channels. Including email, phone, social media, and live chat. Today’s most popular support channel is live chat. With 77% of website visitors choosing to leave if a live chat option isn’t provided.
Source: Mobileappdaily
There are several benefits of providing multichannel support to improve customer retention. One advantage is having a good social media presence. Offering support and generating tickets via Facebook and Twitter is essential. It provides further support options for customers and increases brand loyalty. With over 3 billion users on social media, businesses must have a social presence.
Help Desk Software helps bring together all support channels in one place. Enabling you to offer an omnichannel experience. Meaning customers won’t have to waste time repeating their issues to support agents. 31% of UK consumers consider this to be an important aspect of a good service experience.