55% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better experience and 96% will leave a business for bad service. This goes on to prove that with every customer concern, businesses get an opportunity for retention. Strong competition and the volatile nature of customer expectations are two things that drive the risk of churn.
How do we reduce churn? By detecting and addressing the churn risk early in the customer lifecycle before it leads to the decision to cancel. It takes multiple bad experiences for a customer to decide to cancel. Reacting to when to express their intent isn’t sufficient because they’ve already decided to leave.
Proactively approaching customers allows businesses to have a chance at retaining them. Existing customers contribute about 80% of a company’s revenue. In simple terms, retaining more customers is the key to unlocking phenomenal revenue growth.
Here are three ways to ensure customer loyalty by focusing on the customer lifecycle.
Early Risk Detection
There are many factors that lead to a customer’s decision to cancel. But if they are detected early enough, there is always a chance to retain customers. With the help of AI, it is possible to detect customers at high churn risk and deploy retention campaigns.
Early risk detection allows businesses a chance to recover with proactive solutions instead of waiting for a customer’s decision to cancel giving them a better chance at retention. Read more about early risk detection and why measuring churn risk across the customer lifecycle is critical here.
By monitoring customer lifecycle, businesses can avoid the costs of expensive retention, and triggering churn based on bad offers. The plethora of information available via contact centers is crucial in keeping track of their sentiments. Sentiment analysis and AI allow businesses to unlock new potential opportunities to increase CLV.
Risk-Based Segmentation
Monitoring customer health means getting a 360-degree view of customer behavior. Pairing that information with contact center interactions will allow businesses to segregate customers based on their churn risk which leads to risk-based care and risk-aware marketing.
After identifying a high-risk set of customers using agent notes and AI, it is easy for businesses to route a high-risk customer call toward a trained agent who is more adept at handling sensitive customer interactions.
Risk-aware marketing involves curating offers specifically for high-risk customers so as not to bombard them with unnecessary and useless offers. Micro segmentation will help you not only identify your high-value and high-risk customers but also personalize offers to target only the at-risk customers. Tailor-made offers proactively reached out will ensure the right offers to reach them at the right time all while dodging triggering unnecessary churn.
Proactive Approach
Keeping an eye out on customer behavior and concerns pays. Engaging customers proactively before the issue leads to a sour experience, offering a reliable solution that does not keep them coming back for help, and monitoring their call center interactions for a precise and personalized approach to their offers will allow businesses to build loyalty towards their business.
Keeping track of the huge amounts of data for every customer and coming up with solutions needs actionable intelligence in place. You can read how proactive retention is an opportunity to add value while being cost-effective here.
Fierce competition and consumer expectations have surely put pressure on retention. With the right retention solution and strategies accompanied by AI/ML, it is time we focus on retention from day-1 of the customer life cycle. It is always wise to be a step ahead with a solution before a customer approaches us with a problem.
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