BABY COME BACK!
How to Reactivate Churned Customers
Retaining customers is important. Writing for the Harvard Business Review, Amy Gallo says that“increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent increases profits by 25 percent”—but it’s hard . Customers leave for all sorts of reasons, and some of themweren’t a great fit to begin with. Don’t shut the door on those folks just yet. Recently churned customers are actually a great source of reactivated revenue. “Acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one,”Gallo writes. But it’s cheaper to reactivate old customers than onboard new ones. Andmost businesses have a large supply of these customers. In fact, Bain & Company research suggests most businesses have as many inactive customers as they do active ones.
creating consensus is to tie this back to you purpose and strategy. When people understand why they are doing it they are far more likely to provide information they may not otherwise. Asking them to update information without this explanation is a recipe for disaster. Additionally, the software must be setup to do their daily and weekly routine as easy as possible. If the routine is not established early on, you’ll spend an inordinate amount of time reformatting entries and checking for errors. Spending time on these tasks is counterproductive to your purpose and strategy, so a weak third pillar will damage the first and second as well. One of the reasons companies opt for CRM software is to create processes that are replicated across an entire organization. Rather than relying on each teammember to create something translatable, the software makes things uniform and precise. This precision, though, only comes when your team understands the routine they will follow within Handle. Without a thoroughly planned routine, you won’t get the most out of your CRM software. product to returning customers is a good idea. If you have a lot of complaints about a specific issue, and you’ve recently fixed that issue, get in touch with old customers and let them know. Many of themmay want to sign up again. Remember, engagement leads to sales. If you can get them to take a survey or read a white paper, their odds of buying just went up. It’s very similar to how you’d treat a new customer —align your brand with value in their mind. As you reactivate customers, keep an eye on your churn rates and exit polls.“When you know that more customers or subscribers are cutting ties with your firm, you can work to adjust,”Gallo says.“Changes in a company’s churn rate could be a signal that something is working.” Why Routine Matters
In previous editions, we’ve covered the first two pillars of CRM adoption: purpose and strategy. Once your organization has a clearly defined purpose for what you want to gain from CRM implementation, and after you’ve developed a strategy for achieving your goals, you need to establish a routine for how your staff will use the software itself. Routine is the third pillar of CRM adoption, and it will go a long way toward setting up a model for long-term success. The most common problemwith the routine component arises when companies simply show their staff the software. A presentation introducing features and applications is not sufficient when it comes to installing practices that all team members clearly understand and will act on consistently. If you expect everyone to use CRM the same way without detailed instruction, you’ll end up with different teammembers using it in different ways. The way to avoid this confusion is through planning a routine in detail. The routine should include what they do daily and weekly, the key to Divide the number of people who stopped using your services in the last month by your total customers. That’s the“churn rate,”and those churned customers are the ones to go after. If you haven’t been exit-polling customers, you should do so. It can be as simple as an email asking why they stopped using your services and incentivizing themwith a gift card or something similar for completing the poll. Combined with the churn rate, this provides valuable information on who’s leaving and why. You’re thinking,“Gee, I have some former customers, but I don’t think they’d want to hear fromme again.”Leave the cases that involved heated language, aggravation, and a history of upset. Everyone else can be reactivated, and there are a lot of ways to do it. Offering a free service or
THE 6 PILLARS OF CRM ADOPTION
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