Customer retention is an area, where organizations often look to, as business starts to plateau, or worse, starts to decline. Often the data is looked at, and research conducted to understand and mitigate the causes, before customers find a better value elsewhere. While, there are no wrong answers in how we launch retention programs, the effectiveness and sustainability will be a factor of how well we researched our offers. The areas outlined below may help develop a better understanding of our retention needs and offers.
- Is your core product/service still fulfilling the customer need? This is relevant where the core offering starts to get viewed as a necessity and there are alternatives that may either replace the need or alter it in ways that is not relevant to your organizations strengths and/or operations. Google’s search is being imitated and customer search behavior is modifying to social/video/mobile search. There is even a need for a simpler search engine being proposed by industry leaders. Search is still relevant, but Google is forced to think beyond the traditional model to accommodate changing consumer behavior.
- Are the customers getting what they were promised? Here is one of the obvious ones – if I buy a cell phone, but the calls getting dropped, it may be time to find an alternative. Setting customer expectations and meeting them is more than half the battle won, in spite of other changes that may be impacting your products and services.
- Do you have other products and services that enhance the value of your core offering? Not as easy and obvious, but extremely powerful. Customers trust and want to feel good about the brand they are already engaged with (assuming we have a check mark against #2 above). To enhance their brand experience, we need to develop and offer a portfolio that enhances the experience of our core offering. We are all familiar with bundles of phone, Internet and cable services that are now common place amongst the connectivity providers.
- Lastly, is the industry landscape changing? – are the competitors, technology, consumer behaviors altering the landscape such that; your product/service is becoming a commodity, new services are being added, customer expectations are changing, etc? One of the most fascinating examples of this dynamic is visible in the Satellite Internet industry, where broadband speeds, data capacity and prices are expected to be comparable to DSL and cable, as opposed to simply being better than dial-up.
Evaluating our portfolio in the light of the above questions may help find ways to keep customers excited about our brand and sustain growth through their greater participation and share of wallet (topic for a later post).
