Every business plan designed to drive growth and ROI focuses heavily on ways to acquire new customers. Businesses conduct extensive research to understand the market, and this understanding is reflected in marketing efforts. But one aspect of growing the business that often goes unnoticed is customer retention.
Modern businesses rely very heavily on software tools to manage their operations. These tools are mostly used to automate specific workflows, analyze trends, detect anomalies, and enhance collaboration. They can also greatly improve customer retention by automating customer follow-up processes.
For example, after a car salesperson closes a deal, a regular call once every couple of months to ensure everything is smooth does the trick. The customer feels valued and will definitely be more inclined to come back. This also creates opportunities for cross-selling.
How successful businesses keep their customer retention rates high
Customer retention is a business strategy that helps you focus on keeping your customers satisfied and engaged over a long period. It is so highly regarded because it is cheaper for a business to keep an existing customer than acquire new ones.
Loyal customers will stick around for a long time, and so they spend more. As they continue to use a product or service, their experiences go into the feedback loop, leading to more nuanced development. They also become vocal advocates for your business, elevating brand value.
Customer retention is usually tracked with metrics like Customer Retention Rate (CRR), Customer Churn Rate, and Customer Lifetime Value, among others. Let's focus on the churn rate, as that indicates the number of customers leaving a business during a period. The lower the churn rate, the better. Businesses extensively look for ways to reduce the churn rate. There are tested methods that help in bringing this number down. And with the help of AI, the rate can drastically be minimized.
AI can help you enrich customer support and provide a hassle-free experience. Also AI can answer tickets on behalf of a support agent from existing knowledge bases, compose emails, and generate call transcripts, as well as help deliver personalized experiences to your customers–that’s something every customer wants. It doesn't stop there: AI can also help you with targeted campaigning, detect trends or anomalies, and engage with customers via multiple channels.
That way, businesses can free up employees without compromising on delivering highly personalized experiences.
Customer retention champions: Zoho CRM and Dialpad's integration to boost your business productivity
It's clear that AI can help businesses scale their productivity to higher levels. Let's look at how one can benefit by bringing their CRM and a comprehensive communication platform.
Zoho CRM ships with Zia, an AI-powered sales assistant. Zia tells sales reps the best time to reach out to a lead, the probability of a deal closing, and automation possibilities. To elevate customer retention, Zia also predicts churn rates for you to react instantly.
When Dialpad is integrated with Zoho CRM, the sales reps can now make calls using Dialpad without ever leaving Zoho CRM. Dialpad's built-in Ai records and transcribes these calls and even generates summaries in an instant. On the flip side, sales reps can automatically view the contact profile from Zoho CRM while receiving a call. All ongoing activities are populated on the go. They can even make notes and log the same seamlessly to Zoho CRM.
The future of AI for increasing customer retention
AI is something we all need to embrace and adopt. It is here to stay, and it is only going to get better and more efficient in the future. Businesses are looking to employ AI to solve problems across their operations as it helps boost productivity and keep the running costs low. Currently, in the B2B space, there are AI-powered products that help in lead generation, lead qualification, note-taking, sales forecasting and analytics, customer support, and marketing automation to name a few areas.
Let's talk about how AI can help in retaining meaningful customers. We have to circle back to providing a hyper-personalized experience to the customer. With AI, it is now possible to deliver such experiences on a large scale, by, for example, analyzing customer behavior to understand their requirements better, and allowing for better-tailored recommendations. When it comes to support, AI-powered chatbots can effortlessly cater 24X7 support to customers and understand their sentiment from their feedback and questions. It even monitors the usage of your product and helps improve their usability.
The adoption of AI doesn't have to be a stressful process as software tools are in a race to incorporate AI-powered features across their products. The need to embrace this technology cannot be stressed enough.
Every business wants a positive bottom line at the end of every quarter, and focusing on customer retention is crucial. The traditional way of retaining customers, like getting to know them on a personal level, improving their recommendations, and crafting loyalty programs, cannot realistically be scaled as your business grows.
That’s why embracing newer technology, artificial intelligence in this case, is the way to go. The tools you use may change, but the art of maintaining relationships with your customers remains the same.