Third episode in our summer series on customer loyalty.
Loyalty is a strategic axis for any company, whatever its size or sector of activity, in both BtoB and BtoC.
As we have seen in previous episodes, there is an urgent need to implement this axis, and it’s a mistake to think that classic loyalty programs based on economics are the answer to this problem.
This episode presents the 4 levers we’ve identified to boost your customer retention policy.
They work because we’ve tested them over and over again in a variety of environments.
1- Map the customer journey
Customer journey mapping is the first lever of any retention strategy. It’s essential to have a global view of your business and the overall purpose of your actions. The customer journey must be described not from the company’s point of view, but from that of the customer.
One way of doing this is to think in terms of the value chain from the customer’s point of view, rather than the company’s. Jean-Paul Crenn, founder of VUCA Strategy, developed this approach in an article published in Stratégies 4 years ago.
The advantage of the mapping exercise is that it takes retention into account before customer acquisition. Asking how to retain a customer who hasn’t ordered in 6 months is far too late. We’ll see in the next episode of this series that one of the keys to a successful retention policy is knowing how to target your ideal customers, and then offering them benefits and features that make re-purchasing no longer a problem, but a matter of course.
2- Identify the drivers of customer churn
Why do customers leave you, stop coming back, cancel their subscription? These are questions to which you need clear answers.
Your customers are leaving you because they feel too much friction in your relationship. You need to “smooth out” any rough edges to make them run more smoothly. We’ll be describing this customer knowledge lever in detail in one of the next episodes of this series.
3- Win back your best customers
This is the other side of the coin: how to detect a customer who’s in danger of leaving you, and how to win them back before you lose them. We’ll look at this subject in detail in conjunction with loss identification.
4- Assign roles and responsibilities for customer retention within your company
While the marketing department plays the main role in retention, our analysis of the best-performing companies in terms of loyalty – those that maintain relationships over time – all have one thing in common: they see retention as everyone’s business.
It’s a question of determining the roles and responsibilities of everyone involved in optimizing the retention rate, including and above all, the departments in charge of acquisition, because there’s no point in plugging customer losses if we don’t recruit the customer profiles likely to remain loyal.
We’ll start describing these levers by mapping the customer journey in the next episode.
