Most companies are focusing on seeking to conquer more space and attract more and more buyers. In this sense, closing a greater number of sales each new period. They’re not wrong—but they’re forgetting that retaining customers is essential to maintaining healthy growth.
Your company may have fast development and count on new business every day, but if your team doesn’t try to keep the conquered customers and focus only on the new ones, little by little your base will crumble. After all, it is not enough to prospect, for new customers, every day, you must ensure the satisfaction of those who already do business with you.
To help your team ensure the permanence of your customers, we created this short post with some golden tips. Check out!
Retain customers in the IT area and churn rate
Have you ever heard of a churn rate? This term, loosely translated as churn rate, measures the number of cancellations by customers in service businesses during a given period.
Of course, the idea is to keep this indicator at zero per month. But in reality, most companies deal with a high churn at the end of the month. This may be mainly linked to the lack of quality control after winning over the customer.
Losing deals is the same as losing your company’s revenue and profitability: over time, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain growth and win back lost customers.
With this, it is clear that losing agreements periodically ends up undermining your efforts to win over other contractors. As they say, one customer enters through the front door while two exit through the back door.
Because of this, you and your team must not only focus on finding new customers but also need to direct efforts to retain them and ensure their satisfaction, minimizing churn as much as possible.
Tips for retaining customers
There are a number of ways your business can improve its numbers and maintain healthy growth while avoiding the dreaded cancellations. Let’s list some techniques to help you keep your customers.
1. Analysis of your company and target audience
The first step, which must be carried out even before winning the first customer, during the company’s planning phase, is to analyze its target audience. Who is your company, and what are its main services and attributes? Is your team capable of meeting large demands today?
These are the first points to be answered and they concern your company — that’s because to know if you can be really useful to a contractor, you need to know all its positive and negative points.
You may be able to close a deal even if you are not providing an essential service for your customer, however, cancellation is certain. In this way, seek to find the target audience that really needs your services, ensuring dependence.
2. Onboarding
Onboarding is a term directly linked to the first experience a customer will have with your services. It is the achievement of value before the contractor, the moment when you will see that your investment was worth it.
This is the client’s first contact with your services and, because of that, you should invest in personalized service in order to clear all doubts regarding the methodology, processes, platforms, concepts, and contact channels.
He needs to really understand how the whole process works — especially not to think that any problem that may arise is his team’s fault. It is necessary that all his employees keep a different look at this client during the onboarding period.
3. Continuous improvement
Another big problem that ends up generating a high cancellation rate is the feeling of abandonment that the customer feels after closing the deal.
The lack of support or the search for new solutions ends up making the contractor think that he is not paying for the best service.
You must always be thinking about new technologies and solutions that can further improve the client’s processes, thus demonstrating that your team is concerned with providing the best possible service and that the contractor’s company is important to you.
4. Request for feedback
Something common in cancellation is the manager receiving the news and thinking to himself “what happened?”. Well, just the fact that you don’t know what led to the cancellation says a lot.
It is necessary to listen to what the customer has to say, their complaints, and also their suggestions. By understanding what went wrong in one business, you can work to improve your approach in the next.
While the customer is using your services, keep in touch as much as possible, checking the opinion of your team and delivering reports about their activities. If cancellation occurs, try to get in touch and check the causes to avoid another situation like this in the future.
5. Personalized Services
Each customer is different from another. One company may require a number of services, while another needs different types. Thus, it is also necessary to adapt to this reality.
Do not create a catalog of services in plaster, because if a company does not use any of them, it may end up thinking that investing in your company is not the best option and seek cancellation.
Create adjustable services that can adapt to the reality of each of your customers, and allow them to choose, among a range of options, those that will be best used.
6. Customer Success
Another important point to retain customers in IT companies is to create a Customer Success department, responsible for monitoring the purchaser’s journey.
This way it is much easier to do business with companies that are more aligned with their services and to verify and address dissatisfactions before they end up generating a cancellation.
This personalized follow-up will guarantee the capture of qualified leads by marketing and a better service of their demands. Satisfaction will be achieved and the churn rate will decrease.
Retaining customers in IT companies is not an easy task, because it is necessary to change the vision of seeking more and more business and focus on solving each customer’s problems, leaving them satisfied before looking for new agreements.
