By John Garvey
Research cited by Harvard Business Review shows that improving customer retention by five percent results in a 25 to 95 percent increase in profits. Keeping current customers is also less expensive and easier for your business.
Here are a few quick customer retention tips:
- Pilot new loyalty programs. If you’re running a coffee shop, there’s nothing wrong with a simple punchcard-based rewards system. But for most retailers, a loyalty program that tracks purchases electronically and provides customer-specific insights will be much more valuable. The better your customer data is, the more you can tailor rewards to customers, offering them discounts on their favorite brands, birthday pings, and the like.
- Communicate your purpose across channels. Knowing your “why” can excite employees to communicate the value of your business to your customers. This can be a social or civic mission, or it can simply be an exceptionally strong commitment to satisfying a need. Goodwill Denver, an RCS Customer, collects donations for its programs for people with disabilities or disadvantaging conditions. Goodwill Denver has implemented the round-up feature on NCR Counterpoint to allow customers to make easy donations. Customers have the option to “round up” their payment to the nearest dollar in support of Goodwill’s mission. This generates awareness of a worthy cause, as well as, drives customer loyalty.
- Use a CRM program that organizes customer data and helps with marketing automation. Organized customer data is a prerequisite to effective marketing, and tools like Customer Connect in NCR Counterpoint make it easy. Create recurring email campaigns to welcome new customers, send birthday offers, or tell customers you miss them. Set up the campaign one time and going forward it will be sent out automatically. Use customer information and purchase history from your NCR Counterpoint system to set up customer segments, such as VIPs, loyalty card members, or purchasers of specific products. Electronic receipts delivered by email, another feature built into our POS systems, also allow businesses to send customer feedback surveys and additional offers with ease.
- Use a POS system that makes browsing and buying products seamless. Admit it: You’ve walked out of at least one business because the line was too long, or moving slow. Digital displays and self-checkout kiosks can make queue management a breeze. And they free up your customer service reps to have more substantive conversations with shoppers.
Each of our retail solutions, including, Cegid, NCR Counterpoint, and Revel improves the customer experience in different ways. Schedule a consultation with one of our retail solutions experts to determine what’s the best match for your budget and business model.
