Customer support is important for the long-term success of any business, everyone understands that. But what exactly is the role of the customer support department in leveraging the competitive advantage?

The answer is simple: by retaining your customers and not letting them go anywhere else.

Customer retention should be the ultimate goal of any customer support team so your customers keep getting satisfied with your services and don’t have to look at other brands or alternatives.

So, let’s have a look at various strategies that can help you achieve customer retention through proactive and reactive techniques.

Proactive and Reactive Customer Retention

There is a need to classify various customer retention strategies as proactive and reactive depending on who is handling what. In the past, the sales and marketing teams were responsible for proactive customer retention, while implementing reactive techniques was the responsibility of the customer support team.

However, nowadays it’s more the responsibility of the customer support team to use both the proactive and reactive strategies to help retain customers.

So, what exactly are these techniques?

Let’s define them.

Proactive customer retention refers to processes and techniques that serve to keep a customer happy, engaged, and satisfied before a problem arises.

Reactive customer retention, on the other hand, refers to activities that minimize a customer further distancing himself/herself from your business after a problem arose and they decided to reach out.

Proactive strategies are more important because it has been observed that 95% of customers want the support to be available before they place an order. If these strategies are well in place, your customers won’t feel the need to reach out after they have placed an order and are experiencing problems.

However, the importance of reactive strategies cannot be overlooked either. This is because problems do arise and customers do want to reach out at some point during the time they spend interacting with your business in some way.

7 Expert-Backed Strategies for Customer Retention

Proactive Strategies

Now that we understand what proactive customer retention means, it’s time to look at some of the strategies in this regard that will help you keep your customer happy and satisfied even before they have had a bad encounter.

1. Building a customer feedback loop

Customer experience can only be improved through proactive customer feedback. There is no need to wait for disgruntled comments to improve your services. You can keep asking your customers from time to time if they were satisfied with a particular service.

Use this feedback as a source to implement practices that will make customers happier and more satisfied. The senior management should get this feedback from their customer support team on a regular basis.

These sessions ensure that customers’ problems are solved even before they arise through improved service and experience.

2. Being as much available as possible

The importance of being accessible at all times cannot be overemphasized in the area of customer support. You can use tools to find out your peak times when customers are the most active.

Use your resources and staff during this peak time to tailor your open hours. This will help reduce the costs and ensure that your customers are taken care of when they need you.

This also covers providing omnichannel support so customers can reach out through any channel they want whether it’s live chat, email, Whatsapp or Instagram messaging, or any other method they want to use.

3. Providing customer self-service options

Most successful businesses today have a huge knowledge base covering all topics and areas related to their business so that customers can refer to it and solve their own problems.

You can have a comprehensive FAQs section on your website as well as an AI chatbot that answers common questions/queries automatically.

In addition, having a peer-to-peer community to allow your customers to interact with one another also allows for addressing a number of common issues and problems.   

Reactive Strategies

Regardless of how effective your proactive strategies are, customers are still going to contact you and there’s no escaping this fact. This is where the importance of reactive strategies is realized.

4. Going out of the way to solve your customer’s problem

While this strategy is not scalable, it can be practiced every now and then to retain a happy customer and use his/her support as word of mouth marketing to grow your business. You can also take along your marketing team to record a video or take your customer’s response to such an event to put up on your social media and boost sales.

5. Tackling your backlog efficiently

To minimize backlog during peak times, train your customer support team to strike a balance between quality and speed of responses. There is no need to spend more than 5 to 10 minutes tackling a disgruntled customer when there are many others waiting in line.

You can refer them to senior management or offer them links to your knowledge base where they will be able to find their answer.

Again, you can use tools to help your team proactively create a balance between quality and speed of responses during peak times. It is known as incentivizing your agents so they are able to tackle the problems head-on and minimize their backlog.

Business managers can customize the tool to put emphasis on areas related more to their business success so the agents would be able to strike a balance effectively.

Wrapping Up

There can be many reasons for having a call center or an impressive customer services team for your business. From keeping your customers satisfied and engaged to building brand loyalty, all goals merge at a single common point and that is known as customer retention in simple terms.

Here we looked at the top strategies to retain your customers that actually work! They are proven and tested techniques with expert-backed opinions on their effectiveness. If you are planning how your customer services will work, keep these strategies on the forefront and you won’t have to implement anything else.