Is your startup facing issues with customer retention?
Losing customers is among the worst nightmares for any business, especially after you have made enormous efforts to win them.
However, even a small mistake is enough for customers to attrite from brands, and cause immense harm for your startup and its reputation. As aptly said by Jeff Bezos, – “If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
Bezos’ statement holds true for bad customer experience too. A dissatisfied customer can and will spread a negative word of mouth, thereby badly implicating your business for a considerable amount of time.
Once you have figured out that you are losing customers, you must make an earnest effort to get them back, and we have enlisted the top 5 ways you can do so.
- Own your mistakes
Trust us – adopting a defensive approach to bury negative customer experience will do you no good. Contrarily, it might make matters worse. A great way to start getting customers to trust your brand again is to own your mistakes. Make an apology with utmost honesty and sincerity; explain what exactly went wrong, and how things can be resolved at the earliest. We live in an environment where the customer is always right. Therefore, if you accept your errors transparently and in a candid manner with your customers, it will always strike the right chords with them. Owning mistakes is the number 1 way to get customers coming back your brand.
- Offer them a Glimpse into your Product Roadmap
Often, customers want to leave a brand because they feel that don’t fit in anymore. They feel left out and negated. The primary cause of this is bad customer engagement policies. After acquiring new customers, businesses habitually don’t pay heed to engage them. This results in customer dissatisfaction and eventually attrition. The best way to counter such a situation is to share a roadmap of your products(s), which will help them determine whether your brand can become more suitable for them in the future. This way you can make your customers feel more important and thereby, able to win them back.
- Include Customer Recommendations to Resolve Issues
A customer recommended action is what most dissatisfied consumers want to make them feel that they are cared for. This is because making customers a part of resolving issues makes them forget about their complaints. Moreover, you also might discover some answers that were previously unknown to you. If your customers end up demanding something that your startup will not be able to afford, don’t blatantly say that it will not work. Instead, come up with a substitute option.
- Deliver on the Promise
At the end of the day, what will save your brand from high customer attrition, are not empty promises, but to deliver on those promises. Once you have promised the customer a solution or a set of solutions, you would do better to live up to them and complete the tasks within the time period as promised. Once your customers have come up to you with their complaints, you should view it as a second chance that is being offered by them to make things right. Hence, you should leave no stone unturned to act fast on resolve the issues.
- Seal the Deal with Incentives
Incentives are like the cherry on the cake. Yes, you have been able to resolve customer complaints and win them back. However, offering some incentives after that, in the form of gift cards, discount coupons, or some freebies will surely reassert confidence among your customers, and make them say good things about your startup. Remember, word of mouth?
