How to Avoid Losing Customers to Your Competitors: Strategies to Implement with NetHunt CRM
Here is how to no longer lose customers with NetHunt CRM.
Keeping a customer is 5 to 25 times cheaper than getting a new one. Also, increasing customer retention by only 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%. Need we say more to convince you that lost customers are bad for business? Besides, your loss is your competitor’s gain.
So don’t put off dealing with customer churn until it’s too late. You need a ready-made customer retention strategy before getting the first lead. And there’s no better tool to get there than NetHunt CRM. After all, customer relationship management is right there in the name 😉.
Why do you lose customers to competitors?
The short answer is they find a better offer.
The long answer is more complex. In the end, everything depends on the industry and the business model. A long line might turn customers away from Starbucks, but for a bank or a beauty salon, poor customer experience is a much bigger reason for churn.
Let’s make things simple. Down at their core, customers leave because of:
- What you say. Promise them to double their profits in a month, and fail to deliver, and you’ll see their backs. Misleading advertising, heightened expectations, and outright lies may gain you new customers but will lose them just as quickly.
- What you sell. The best advertisers, marketers, and salespeople won’t convince customers to stay if the product is bad, bland, or overpriced. Unless your product solves the problem and offers unique benefits without costing customers an arm and a leg, you won’t see their business again. The competition is too cutthroat for that.
- What you do. No one likes hearing, “Your call is very important to us. Please stay on the line” more than once. Long wait times, slow responses, useless chatbots, and other customer service mishaps are among the top reasons for losing clients. If you fail to follow up, stay in touch, and remind the client about yourself, you’ll lose them, too.
When you look at it that way, keeping customers feels like an uphill battle. If any wrong word or move can push them away, what’s a business to do? Don’t fret. There are surefire ways to stop losing customers.
How to avoid losing customers: 3 key strategies
No business is immune to losing sales. However, every business wants to eliminate this issue to achieve healthy profits. If losing a customer is a chronic condition, you can manage it long-term with careful diagnosis and treatment.
Diagnose: Compare your best and worst cases
To understand the problem, you need to see the best-case scenario first. Look through your records to find your perfect customer and learn everything about them:
- Where do the leads originate?
- How do the leads progress through the pipeline?
- How many of your emails do they read?
- How much money do you make?
- How many upsells do you achieve?
Once you have all your answers, you’ll have a clear picture of your ideal customer — someone that your team should strive to attract and retain.
Next, analyze your worst-case scenarios. Start with the usage data and reviews you already have, but add surveys, follow-ups, and polls to learn why customers leave and what would convince them to return.
Finally, compare the lost client to your ideal customer benchmark to identify discrepancies that could cause churn. These could be anything from an unhelpful customer support agent to the lack of educational materials on your website. Your goal is to find the underlying reason, not a scapegoat.
Treat: Prove you understand and care about customers’ needs
68% of customers leave because of perceived indifference. It’s a dated study by John Gattrona, but the sentiment remains even if the number has changed. Most customers want you to read their minds, know exactly what they need, and deliver it quickly and for free, or at least at an affordable rate.
Combine active and passive approaches to better understand your customers. Send surveys, record chat logs and phone calls, and solicit feedback. But also analyze their activities and interactions to gain additional insights.
Since most businesses can’t personalize their products for every customer, segmentation is the next best thing. Once you tailor your marketing and sales efforts to suit each customer segment, you’ll see better returns. Moreover, customizing your interactions with different segments will show customers you care about their needs.
Sustain: Deliver smooth customer service from leads to upsells
Marketing, sales, and customer support (or customer success) teams must work seamlessly together to keep customers happy in the long run. It’s the handover between different teams that often causes friction and loss of customers. When a customer support agent fails to deliver on a sales rep’s promises, it creates unnecessary frustration and erodes trust.
To avoid such issues, all customer-facing teams and employees must keep detailed customer interaction logs and provide a bird' s-eye view of their history.
How NetHunt CRM helps prevent customer loss
Now you know how to avoid losing customers to competitors. But how can you seamlessly integrate customer retention into your daily operations? That’s what NetHunt CRM is for. Its features are tailored to nurture strong customer relationships, foster brand loyalty, and increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
Deepen your understanding with customer base segmentation
Segmentation is at the core of personalized offers and customer success approaches. NetHunt CRM lets you create multiple custom views, filtering customers by location, position, industry, and other parameters. With email templates and other tools, NetHunt CRM unlocks targeted communication, addressing specific needs and preventing customer loss.
For example, target customers within a city where you open a new office or branch to invite them for a consultation or a demo. By limiting the newsletter to a specific group, you’ll avoid annoying other customers on the other side of the country (or the world).
Maintain customer engagement with automation
Reaching out to each customer or segment manually is a lot of work unless NetHunt CRM automation takes over. All you have to do is set up email sequence templates and use workflows to set up triggers and send out emails to specific client groups. Thanks to automation, your customers will never feel you’re indifferent to their needs.
Besides, with NetHunt CRM, emails aren’t the only thing you can automate. Set up triggers and workflows based on customer interactions or activities, and NetHunt CRM will schedule reminders for reps and set up calls or demos.
For example, if a customer responds to your educational drip campaign, NetHunt CRM will assign a customer success rep to run a personalized follow-up. Thanks to eliminating many administrative tasks for the sales and customer support teams, NetHunt lets them focus on not losing a client.
Communicate via multiple channels convenient for customers
NetHunt CRM consolidates data from multiple sources to deliver a seamless customer experience. NetHunt CRM integrations include Gmail, WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Messenger, Viber, Telegram, and other popular platforms. Each message, chat, and call is recorded and automatically added to the customer timeline, giving every team member a detailed view of the customer’s questions, comments, and complaints. Use this data right, and you won’t lose a customer.
For instance, if a client follows up on an email complaint in WhatsApp, your customer support reps can instantly pull up the data without making the client wait forever. Short response time and helpful support will win the customer back most of the time.
Reduce customer churn with reporting
NetHunt reports are invaluable for understanding the reasons behind the won and lost deals and preventing product churn. Among the many automated reports available, sales-by-customer reports are particularly helpful in identifying which clients generate the highest profits. Those are your exemplary clients, the ones to compare the others to.
The lost reason report is especially valuable to prevent churn, highlighting why the deals are lost and what you need to improve. Use the insights from this report to estimate future churn and take measures to prevent it.
The lost reason report also helps you develop a strategy for how to respond to losing a client and potentially winning them back. For example, if the client cites pricing as their reason for leaving, offer them a one-time discount or a special service package.
Checklist: Avoid losing business to your competitors
If you ever need a reminder of how to avoid losing customers to your competitors, use this checklist:
- Your customer persona profiles include the core needs and pain points
- You segment customers into groups according to their needs
- You regularly collect customer feedback through surveys and polls
- You set up follow-ups after customer tickets to ensure satisfaction
- You proactively address customer feedback to resolve issues early on
- Your customer service operates seamlessly across email, chats, phone, etc.
- Your customer service response time is under 5 minutes
- You provide self-service options, such as a knowledge base or FAQ
- You offer loyalty incentives and rewards to regular customers
- You analyze sales reports to identify potential lost customers
- Your analytics generate insights for preventing customer churn
- You adjust your marketing, sales, and customer support strategies to ensure customer retention
Although some of these depend on personnel training and other factors, NetHunt CRM makes most of these points easy to implement and integrate into daily operations.
Conclusion
There’s no easy answer for how to avoid losing business to your competitors. No company has a perfect 100% retention rate. But you will get close if you understand what makes customers leave, namely, your marketing, product, or customer service.
Once you identify the problem, NetHunt CRM will help solve it. Segmenting the customer base for personalized communication and adding automations to your daily processes has never been easier. Moreover, our smooth integrations deliver seamless communication and customer service. Finally, NetHunt CRM reports are an endless source of insights for predicting and reducing churn, as well as fostering brand loyalty.