Are your customers leaving you and you don’t know why? As a whole, the financial services industry is an extremely tough and competitive climate to operate in, with companies working hard to manage their reputations and overcome operational challenges. So when your customers are leaving, quick action is needed.
The cost of replacing customers is higher than retaining loyal ones, especially when you add acquisition costs such as advertising, managing sales and time spent on conversion to the mix. According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, customer acquisition is six to seven times more costly than customer retention.
Related content: The common pitfalls of customer experience management
Solution: Listen, act, track
1) Listen to your customers
When companies find that they constantly need to acquire new customers in order to keep business ticking along, it’s a sign that they are not listening to their customers’ needs.
Moreover, a constant stream of customers abandoning ship means that the issues customers experience continue to remain unresolved. To identify where you’re going wrong, it’s important to conduct regular customer satisfaction and feedback surveys.
There is more than one way to do this. You can:
- Add them at end of sales or customer service calls.
- Have a short exit survey for when customers leave your business.
- Use an online customer satisfaction survey.
2) Get daily feedback and act fast
How do you know that a customer is about to leave before it happens? Many companies who monitor and receive customer feedback often find that by the time they receive feedback, it is outdated and too late to save their most unhappy customers from churning.
Having frequent feedback, and therefore the visibility to be able to save these customers in time, is one of the most powerful benefits that an advanced customer experience management system can offer. This is invaluable as it can increase your customer retention rates.
Daily customer experience management (CEM) solutions can:
- Give you feedback every day.
- Provide visibility over who your most unhappy customers are.
- Identify your most at-risk customers and allow you to act fast on saving them.
- Assign specific staff, or a team, to proactively respond to your unhappiest customers.
3) Keep track over time
Unless you conduct regular surveys and competitor tracking, you won’t get a full view of how you’re tracking over time—or how you’re faring against your biggest competitors.
Conducting regular surveys and monitoring customer feedback using the Net Promoter Score, is one way to achieve this. Once you’ve got your NPS score, you can check the New Zealand NPS industry benchmarks to see how you’re tracking.
Read more: 5 reasons why your business needs a Net Promoter Score system
Want to know more? Learn how to overcome the key customer experience challenges in the financial industry with our free eBook!
