Customer Retention Strategy

As a start-up CEO, it is important that you build this strategy right at the outset, because this is a smart way of growing your business instead of just adding new customers. Ofcourse, getting new customers is critical to your business growth because it ensures a bigger market share and more endorsements for your product. But customer retention ensures additional business at negligible costs. So how do you do this effectively?

Three things that are critical to your customer retention strategy are:

Deliver Top Quality Service:

You may have built the ‘best’ service delivery process to ensure top quality service. Constantly question that process and find ways and means to better it all the time. Use every customer learning to change your process for the better. Anticipate what the customer would want and deliver it without being asked. Make your service delivery process more customer-centric. All this may come at a cost. But rich dividends are ensured in the long run.

Deliver on your Promise:

For a young enterprise, building credibility is not only the biggest challenge but also a constant process. If you can get your customer to speak for you, you will have people listening. But for this, the customer should have got what he expected. What you promised. So, promise only what you can deliver and deliver what you promise. Irrespective of great service delivery, if the customer does not get what you promised, you will still have an unhappy customer.

Build Competitive Barriers:

Use your customer learning to better your product all the time. Come up with new functionalities and features. Know what your competition is doing and ensure your product delivers one better. Building complimentary products and features around your product will ensure recurring business from your customer as well as keeping out competition.

All these will help in increasing the Life Time Value (LTV) of your customer leading to rapid and predictable scaling of your business.

The author, Srikanth Vasuraj, is a Business Consultant focused on helping start-ups to grow. He can be reached at +91-98454 78585 or srikanth@nodiva.co.in . For more information please visit www.nodiva.co.in .