What Factors Impact Customer Retention (And What Happens If You Ignore Them)?
Various factors impact customer retention and not properly attending to them can have disastrous consequences though you may not immediately see the effects.
April 20, 2023
blog, outreach
Communication, planning, onboarding, and measurement
Communication
Communicating with your customers is the biggest factor in customer success management. It allows you to take the next logical step to reach your goals. Without proper communication, it will be difficult to create, market, and sell products.
Yes, you can do those without getting input from potential customers. However, you’ll end up diving with a 50-50 chance of success. With communication, companies can learn from customers. They’ll also know how they’re impacting their clients and what values they’re providing.
Planning and onboarding
Each customer's success is different from another. What works for one client may not be applicable to others. By having an effective planning and onboarding process, you can tailor your process to your prospect’s individual needs.
Customer success management is a continuous process of working with your customers to achieve your goals. Without an efficient onboarding experience, your profits will suffer. You’ll end up with clients who may not want to come back. The end result may force you to close doors.
By having systematic customer management in place, you’ll be reducing barriers to your success. You can lessen to minimal churn down the road and can offer a seamless experience for your clients.
Measurement
With customer success management, you need to answer two questions:
1. How well are customers doing?
2. How well are we doing?
Having the answers to both will let you know whether or not you’re doing it right.
Measuring how much you’re succeeding will allow you to identify your company’s strengths and weaknesses. You can recognize if you’re making profits or if you need to change your strategy. It also allows you to see if you’re having a positive or negative to your customers and by how much.
Ignoring product quality, customer support, and user experience damages your reputation
Effective customer success management: Customer success management done right will appear frictionless, [and] everything is fine. People are neutral. [If] done incorrectly, the first thing you will notice is negative emotions. Keep this in mind on your journey.
Several factors can impact customer success management, and ignoring these factors can have serious consequences for a company. Here are the top five factors that impact customer success management, along with the consequences of ignoring them:
Product Quality: If a company ignores product quality, it risks losing customers and damaging its reputation.
Customer Support: If a company ignores customer support, it risks losing customers and damaging its reputation.
User Experience: If a product is difficult to use or navigate, customers may become frustrated and abandon it. By ignoring the user experience, a company risks losing customers and damaging its reputation.
Training and Onboarding: If a company ignores training and onboarding, it risks losing customers and damaging its reputation.
Communication: If a company is responsive and attentive to customer needs, it is more likely to retain and satisfy its customers. If a company ignores communication with its customers, it risks losing them and damaging its reputation.
Michał Suski
Ignoring these three factors leads to less customer retention
1. Communication
When customers have clear, consistent, and timely communication with their customer success team, they can more easily get the answers they need and stay engaged in their customer journey. Without open lines of communication, customers will become frustrated and disengaged in their customer experience, and the consequence of that can be a significant drop in customer retention and satisfaction.
2. Automation
Automation can help streamline and simplify the customer journey, making it easier for customers to get the information they need and quickly find solutions to their problems. Automation can also reduce the manual workload for customer success teams, allowing them to focus on more complex customer needs. However, if automation is not properly implemented, it can lead to a lack of personalized customer experiences and leave customers feeling disconnected from their customer success team.
3. Data collection
When customer success teams have access to real-time data from customer surveys, customer interactions, and other sources, they can gain valuable insights into customer behaviors and trends. This information can be used to customize customer experiences, respond to customer questions quickly, and anticipate customer needs. Without data collection, customer success teams will be unable to effectively manage customer success.
This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors' statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.
Related Articles
Stories, best practices and thought leadership from the customer success community.
