New business growth is important for most any company for several reasons, such as market valuation, competitiveness and investment capital opportunities — but not at the risk of alienating your largest core customer base. For those companies wanting to walk the line of sustained growth and current customer retention, we’ll show you how to double-down on your efforts to keep your long-standing customers happy and your businesses profitable.
Retention Rates Affect Your Bottom Line
Statistic after statistic will tell you the same thing: retaining current customers is more cost-effective than constantly trying to find new leads. In fact, trying to acquire a new customer can cost you five to six times more than simply working to nurture your existing clients’ needs. Even moving your current rate of retention up by just five percent can increase your company’s profits from 25 to 95 percent. Impressive right?
These are hard numbers, not just musings. And the companies seeing the largest growth bumps are also finding viable customer retention opportunities to help secure these long-term relationships. You shouldn’t stop generating new leads, but just as adding cloud-based call center software or shifting your marketing perspective can boost overall profit gains, so can prioritizing your existing customers.
Institutional Perspective
Thriving companies in today’s marketplace do things a bit differently. Instead of focusing on just short-term returns, they invest in the future as well. They view their customer base as vital to their purpose and set out to build long-standing institutions that serve their interests. This mentality usually equates to doing away with formal structures that can stifle innovation, as being agile means companies can adapt their offerings and services more seamlessly.
Customer Centricity
If you want to build a valuable relationship between your business and a client, personalization is the key. Client-centric businesses believe their clients are the center of their company’s operations, philosophy and ideas. These companies do everything they can to keep the client satisfied. Read more how to build a customer centric culture in an organization.
By creating a culture where the customer comes first, you set yourself up for repeated business and enhanced customer loyalty. Not only that, but statistics show companies who repeatedly put their customers focus first are up to 60 percent more profitable than those that were not focused on their customers.
Focus Leads to Success
Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. The names aren’t new, and neither is the lesson their achievements share, that focusing on what’s working in your company is vital to its long-term success. When you avoid drifting into other lanes that aren’t your specialty or what your customer feedback is telling you, then you find the winning formula.
Some may say that customer satisfaction can’t be measured, but as we’ve shown above, that most certainly isn’t always the case. Increasing your efforts to meet current customers’ needs leads to bigger returns for your business. Now is the time to turn your knowledge of focusing on your customers into actionable business practices.
A good read