Did you know it costs you 6 to 7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one? Are you putting in enough effort to keep your customers with you?

You are 3 to 14 times more likely to sell to someone who has already bought from you – but only if they have had a good experience with you, of course!

How do you know if your customers have had a good experience with you? You probably already know that bad news travels further than good news – negative reviews reach more than 2 times the number of people that positive reviews do. But did you know that only around 3.7% of complaints even go directly to you?

In fact, have you examined your cart abandonment rate lately? For those of you without eCommerce stores, this can be difficult. 78% of consumers have backed out on a purchase because of poor customer service. That means not only are you missing out on 96.3% of complaints from paying customers, you will probably never hear from any of your would-be customers who never bought a thing.

Without even knowing what’s going wrong, how can you fix a thing? A full-fledged eCommerce platform can give you insights into cart abandonment and gaps in your selling process, but there are many other ways to keep your customers satisfied with you.

Put things into perspective. Think from your customer’s point of view – you’re a customer yourself, so think of your good service experiences versus your bad service experience.

A major pet peeve is being put on hold for what seems like forever.

No amount of pop music is going to make things better when you need an answer urgently! If your service staff are putting your customers on hold for half an hour with that recorded message saying “we value your call…” – no, you don’t. And your undervalued customers are going to leave you once someone better comes along.

Remember – even if your customer is calling to complain, they are making an effort to help you salvage and even improve the relationship. That makes them several times more valuable than the 26 who choose to walk away. So here are some ways to keep them happy and coming back.

Self enablement

You have limited service staff hours to spare, so try your best to deter them from calling in. Not by making it terribly difficult for them to do so, in the way that some companies hide their phone numbers behind layers and layers of clickthroughs – but by having a helpful self-service system, or a helpful FAQs page on your website.

Make the effort to call them instead

When you’re calling in for an enquiry which should take 5 minutes to resolve, you don’t want to waste 30 minutes being put on hold (raising your blood pressure to dangerous levels).

Usually, your only other choice is to write an email or fill in an online form to get help, which can take anywhere from 1 to 3 days for you to get a text response. This can be frustrating when you need an answer today. Even when you get through, you often encounter customer service representatives who can’t seem to access any information about your case, even if you just made another call yesterday.

In an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, your customer records are all in one place. With global search, you don’t even have to remember where your customer records are stored or slowly navigate your way through everything to find them.

Just enter the details provided by your customer – their name, product purchased, or anything else they’ve provided, and you have everything you need on hand to have a proper conversation with them on the phone.

So by the time you call your customer back, you’re all ready to help them out! AND they’re probably not in a foul mood from being put on hold for a long time, so you get spared a nasty tongue lashing. You spend less time getting information out of them, they spend less time trying to get help, and everybody wins.

The only way this works is if you have responsible staff members who will definitely address the problem within the day (or at least the next working day). Since your staff members have to spend less time on the phone getting information, this should definitely be doable for most of you.

Track all CRM activities

This is imporant, even if you can’t afford a good CRM system just yet. Keep track of which sales are tied to which clients, including their last purchase date and last CRM activity. Have a good plan of action to re-engage your customers when it looks like they are no longer happy with you.

In the ERP system, you can view your customer RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) ratings as well sales activities related to them. Was your last call to them in December? Did they stop purchasing in February? What happened between that time? Keeping a loyal customer is easier when all the information you need is right at your fingertips, even on the go!

Here’s the last statistic we want to leave you with: 80% of customers who switched felt that something could have been done to retain them. Some food for thought for the next time you notice your customers slipping away!