Knowing the value of customer retention isn’t just an indicator for long-term success; it can also provide insights that can help your teams optimize the customer experience, while also making the customer acquisition process easier. With the right reputation management software on hand, you can quickly gain valuable data from every loyal customer and translate it into meaningful actions.
The Value of Customer Retention #1: Easier Customer Acquisition
Aside from continued profits, high customer retention can also help you better acquire new customers. Repeat visitors already enjoy the experience, and the best way they can tell others about your brand is through online reviews. Simply put, feedback is the powerful social proof consumers need to make a purchase decision. In some cases it’s even more powerful than your own marketing material, which makes it important to leverage your best customers as marketing assets.
What’s just as important as getting that feedback is knowing where to put it. High-traffic areas in your locations are an easy win, but it’s also vital to put them online to make it even easier for consumers to see why you are the best choice for their needs. Tools like Amplify, which help show off your best reviews across multiple channels and in different formats can easily expedite the process.
The Value of Customer Retention #2: An Improved Customer Experience
Having a high retention rate doesn’t mean that there isn’t room to improve. Gathering feedback from loyal customers and newcomers alike can help you make tweaks to the experience that can keep loyal visitors happy while also enticing first-time customers to come back.
When looking at feedback, you should make note of certain keywords as well as the sentiment around those keywords. For instance, a handful of positive reviews can show multiple entries about each location’s overall atmosphere while the same number of negative reviews can show multiple incidents of unpleasant staff members. Carefully reading each piece of feedback and noting these trends over time can help teams make the necessary adjustments that lead to a richer customer experience overall.
The process above yields valuable data, but employing a whole team to carefully read each piece of feedback to note specific keywords, sentiments, and trends can take plenty of time and resources away from other parts of your operation. By employing customer experience analytics within your reputation management software platform, you can harness new technology that can easily “read” through hundreds of reviews and provide keyword and sentiment analysis in a matter of minutes.
Conclusion
Most brands know the value of customer retention, but the two additional takeaways above show that you can do even more to better attract customers and improve your own experience. While there is no such thing as a perfect business, you can take one step closer to what your ideal brand operation looks like by taking note of the benefits that come with better customer retention.
