How to Improve Business Retention

Business retention, also called customer retention, is a metric that tells you the percentage of customers who purchased within the last 12 months who also purchased within the previous 12 months before that. Failure to maintain retention means that people are not committed to working with you and that you are losing customers over the long term.

Poor business retention forces you to devote more and more resources to finding new customers to replace the ones you are losing. Because it’s much more expensive to sell to a new customer than an existing one, this situation becomes a drain on your company’s resources.

Why business retention matters

Customer retention matters for every company’s long term success. Not only is constantly needing to find new customer costly and time consuming, but the longer someone works with you, the more value they produce for you. For example, the statistics for equipment dealers are that customers purchase 2.9X more equipment, 9.1X more rentals, 4.1X more service, and 5.6X more parts in the third year as a customer, compared to the second year.

In other words, someone is a much more lucrative customer for you the more years they buy from you. In fact, it typically takes three to five years to replace the income from an existing customer with the income from a new customer.

The moral of this story is to hold on to your current customers.

How can you accomplish that goal? By improving your business retention.

First, understand why people leave you

There are several main reasons behind poor business retention. Customers decide to stop working with you because:

• Their expectations have been mismanaged
• Your team hasn’t been keeping them informed of the status of their orders
• There is a change in point of contact for either you or the customer
• Your team isn’t properly trained or adequately knowledgeable about your products
• Your employees lack the information system support and tools required to be responsive and effective

The first step of improving business retention is pinpointing the reason people are leaving you. Once you understand that reason, you can take actions to improve it.

How we help you retain your customers

Winsby gives you the data, insights, and tools to recognize at risk customers and keep them from leaving you, thereby improving your customer retention rate.

Provide excellent customer service – The best way to hold on to customers is by delivering great, responsive service to your customers. In order to do that, you have to understand their expectations and respond effectively to their needs. At Winsby, we use customer satisfaction surveys to find out what our clients’ customers expect from them and to determine whether there are any problems with our clients’ processes. Armed with these insights, your team can make improvements, fix any issues, and prevent at risk customers from leaving.

Personalize customer interactions – Using our AI system, you can identify the next purchase of a customer, what industry and market they are in, and whether they are at risk. Using that information, you can tailor messaging and offers to meet their specific requirements or current needs. Plus, at Winsby, our team keeps your master lists up to date with the correct contacts, phone numbers, and email addresses.

Always maintain consistent communication – Winsby helps you effectively stay in contact with customers in multiple ways. Using the purchase data we provide you; you can reach out to customers who have not purchased again within their usual time period. We will also distribute highly effective emails on your behalf. Customers who receive our emails usually purchase about two to three times more often than those who don’t. Lastly, our analytics program integrates with most CRM systems to combine analytics data with your sales and marketing data, helping streamline your customer communication.

Know the signs of at risk customers – By tracking the frequency, consistency, and types of purchases, you can recognize who your at risk customers are. If your sales team knows who is in danger of leaving you, they can contact them, ask about their needs, and potentially deliver a special offer or other incentive to get them to stay.

The key to increasing business retention and keeping at risk customers from leaving is to take the right actions as early as possible.

Act sooner, rather than later

Building lasting relationships with customers is crucial for the long term viability of your company, because it makes them more valuable to you and it takes fewer resources to sell to them. Winsby provides the insights, data, and tools needed to retain customers, increase business retention, and improve your sales.

If you’re ready to hold on to more at risk customers and boost retention and sales.