Everyone knows that retaining customers is easier than attracting new customers. After all, you don’t have to spend money on attracting them as they are already your customers. Besides, profits from existing customers are more as they know about your services and products.
But the world has become more competitive today. Customers expect businesses to be perfect. One wrong experience and you can lose your customers. In this digital era, it’s essential that you rethink your ways to benefit from customer retention. Salesforce WordPress Customer Portal is one way to do so.
Let us learn how you can implement customer retention strategies with our Salesforce WordPress Customer Portal.
1. Store Data Centrally
The most effective way to retain customers is to know them. The more you know them, the better you can maintain relationships. It also helps you design your future strategies and shape your brand.
And the ideal way to know customers is – data. When every department gets transparent data, it becomes easier to provide prominent services. For that, it’s essential that your systems are well integrated and data can be stored and accessed centrally.
Our Salesforce WordPress customer portal uses Salesforce CRM as the backend. It means you don’t have to worry about the integration. Besides, it auto syncs the data from the portal into the CRM, eliminating the chances of data misplacement. Every document shared within the organization is properly stored at one place. That means portal users can easily find documents, share, and even find how up to date it is. This simplification improves workflow and helps them focus on important tasks.
Portal also tracks their activities like the actions they perform, customers’ behavior during the entire process, touch points, and more. This gathered data then helps them plan strategies for customers. For example, a research found that 66 percent of consumers prefer watching videos to learn about new products and services. This statistic encourages businesses to provide video tutorials for their products and services.
2. Offer Personalized Experience
The 4Ps of marketing – product, placement, price, and promotions are no longer enough to make customers buy or stay. You need to provide a wonderful experience every time they interact with your business. According to HubSpot, 93 percent of customers will buy products from the businesses that provide quality customer service.
By quality, it means being real, empathetic, listening, developing real conversations and creating memorable experiences. Customers want to feel good about the brand they interact with.
Take a look at Zappos personalised customer service.
No problem! I've looked up a couple that might work for you. Salon Plush https://t.co/Vcn3ANOZpy and Via Dolce Salon seem to have some good reviews https://t.co/ZDHHaKQoxS I hope this helps! *AU
— Zappos.com (@Zappos) March 12, 2018
However, providing quality service can be time consuming and costly. Automation tools can enhance efficiency and deliver personal touch.
- Auto-send personalized emails to the correct representative.
- Create a lasting first impression by greeting/addressing them as they are physically present in front of you.
- Reduce overall turnaround time for response to issues with self-service.
- Implement a seamless onboarding experience with the help of a knowledge base.
- Make customers feel valued by implementing customer feedback.
- Make them happy by providing 24/7 support.
Most of all, you can provide all these personalized experiences with one single tool, i.e., Salesforce WordPress customer portal. WordPress integration also means you and your customers can customize the portal look and feel with easy drag and drop builder. You can choose what data you want to view on the dashboard and in what format.
3. Adopt Omni Channel Communication
Your customers may be scattered around different platforms. Each one of them may have unique preferences. For instance, a few may prefer a call for support while another may prefer a live chat via website, mobile phone, or social media. On top of all this, customers want prompt responses from the same channel. If they have raised a concern on Twitter, they expect a reply on Twitter.
The Salesforce portal provides you with omnichannel communication. It lets you reach customers where they are – by managing all accounts and platforms from one place. It provides social media integration using which your staff can reply to the customer queries directly from the portal. They don’t have to switch between platforms to reply to every customer. And even if a customer switches from Facebook Messenger to in-app chat, your staff can easily continue the chat without customers having to repeat themselves.
4. Client Re-engagement
Every brand has some inactive customers and instead of attracting new clients, brands retarget the existing ones. Similarly, to retain your customers, you need to re-target them with offers they would be interested in. For instance, you can send them personalized emails and messages with exciting offers.
Have a look at Jasper’s Marketing ad.
Source: Neil Patel
Instead of confusing customers with too many products, they focused on a single product with upto the mark content. You can run some ads like that marketing a product or upcoming launch. When they land on your website, you can gather data based on their behavior and run specific ads. For example, if they clicked on your webinar link which is to be held next month, you can retarget them with an article that explains how this webinar will help them. This way, you give them a chance to stay connected.
You can use Salesforce WordPress customer portal and target articles based on their last read or the pages they surfed.
Sometimes, customers also stop engaging because they don’t like your service or no actions were taken on their feedback. According to a report, 79 percent of the consumers’ complaints about poor customer experience are left ignored. So, don’t let them feel you’re not hearing them, take action and solve the problems. Portal will make it easy for you to take feedback. It will also provide you with features like ticket generation, case deflection to solve customer problems quickly. You can also consider that feedback to improve your services.
Personalize your customer service but never make promises that you can’t fulfill.
5. Setup Proactive Customer Support
One-third of consumers say that they will switch to another brand after one instance of poor service. You can prevent 67 percent of customer churn if you resolve issues the first time they occur. So while you can’t afford to make mistakes, you can probably fix them immediately.
Salesforce WordPress customer portal provides your customers with a self-service option. It means if they face any problem, they can look for a solution themselves. They can go through the knowledge base, watch video tutorials, and check FAQs. They can share their problems in the community forum and ask for help. Live chat with the support team will also help them solve their issue promptly. If they can’t find a solution, they can generate tickets themselves rather than waiting for the customer support team.
Here’s a killer example of proactive customer service by Facebook. Instead of relying on tickets and inbound calls, it provides customers various ways to solve their problems themselves.
Source: FreshDesk
A portal facilitates engagement on every touch point while ensuring convenience and effectiveness. It provides various features to reduce customer complaints even before they occur. For example, analyzing customer data and tickets to create a list of FAQs and articles on relevant topics. In the end, support is all about satisfying customers with excellent service and solutions. If they are happy, you’ve retained your customers.
6. Take Advantage of Business Intelligence
27 percent of Americans report lack of efficiency as the number one reason for frustrated customer service. 12 percent say that lack of speed is the reason; 10 percent say that it’s lack of accuracy. Efficiency, speed, and accuracy takes a toll on customer experience and to improve that, reports and analytics play a major role. They help you identify the loopholes in the business and customer service. For instance, you can understand where in the customer lifecycle, they leave. You can then analyze the feedback and reviews to understand the problems they are facing. With total sales, customer service ratings, and total tickets, you can compare your estimated goals and evaluate the profits and loss.
Most of all, you can use the data to implement a customer success approach, which will eventually help you succeed. You can identify the patterns and set goals accordingly. For example, you can track customer performance and come up with strategies to improve their experience.
Conclusion
These 6 strategies can be a game changer in retaining your customers. The best thing is that with Salesforce WordPress customer portal, you can incorporate all these elements and strategies to retain customers. That too without putting in extra effort.
In fact, you can improve your customer service by customizing the Salesforce portal as per your business needs. All you have to do is find the right mix of the solution and the solution provider. We hope our input can be of help.
We provide portal solutions to businesses based on their industry and requirements. We can help you develop a custom Salesforce WordPress customer portal. To know more about us or how we can help you, contact us.
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