4 Customer Experience Improvements That Impact Repeat Buyers and Customer Retention

Smart organizations recognize the importance of keeping current customers and even engaging those same customers in purchases over and over again. However, even if you acknowledge the importance of repeat customers, you may not realize their full impact on your bottom line. For instance:

• Bain & Co. notes that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profitability for a company by as much as 75%
• Accenture estimates the cost of lost business due to customers switching to a competitor at $1.6 trillion
• 82% of companies state that retention is cheaper than customer acquisition, according to Econsultancy

Repeat purchases and customer retention are rooted in customer service, but perhaps not in how you think or even how some customers report its impact. Customer experience goes far beyond delighting the customer, and it requires more thought and planning than simple, straightforward tactics. It's about making things easy, which can be difficult without the right tools.

Make it Easy

To retain customers and keep them coming back for more, many businesses spend time and effort on tactics intended to wow their customers and make them stand out from the crowd. Perhaps it's a string of emails right after purchase. Or it could be little extras thrown in that the customer doesn't expect. These all have the intent of "delighting the customer."

The bad news for companies that rely on those methods is that they just don't work. Research conducted by Gartner proves that out. In fact, it's the simplicity of their interactions with a business that determines loyalty.

"We found that the majority of customers, notably 96%, who had high-effort experiences reported being disloyal, compared to only 9% of customers with low-effort experience," said Nick Toman, Group Vice President at Gartner.

The research identified four key sources of friction in the experience as an existing customer, namely:

• The need to contact the company repeatedly
• Lack of personalization or being treated like a number
• Repeating information
• A perception that it will take more effort to resolve an issue

The good news is that the Salesforce platform already has the tools you need to remove these elements of frustration from the customer's path.

4 Ways that Salesforce Helps You Improve Customer Retention through CX

Make it easy to communicate, regardless of channel

Lowering the bar to communicate with your customers is ideal for eliminating friction in the experience and building loyalty. As part of Salesforce's Service Cloud, Social Customer Service lets customers interact with agents on nearly all social media platforms. That means that they can use the channel they prefer, but they can also reach customer service from anywhere, at any time.

Personalization

Feeling like a number won't invoke the emotions required to inspire customer loyalty or the interest in spending more with a business. However, personalization isn't a single act but an objective fed across many projects. In other words, while Salesforce Customer 360 can tell you every interaction the customer has had, there is a bigger picture to ensuring a personalized experience.

True personalization starts with taking the voice of the customer and combining it with personas to create an optimized customer journey - even after the purchase. What are the touchpoints that exist after a purchase? What purpose do they serve? How do they simplify a user's experience or increase their enjoyment and loyalty? The information collected within the CRM will help personalize a single transaction. Using existing customer data to inform the greater post-purchase journey will help buyers feel heard and seen.

Single source of information

As the Gartner research uncovered, customers hate repeating themselves. So, if they have told their sales representative information and their customer success agent asks for the same info, frustration is likely to skyrocket. Worse, if a customer is trying to make an additional purchase and they have to explain, over and over, what they have bought before, it's should be no surprise when they go and look elsewhere.

Imagine, instead, a scenario where a customer calls to order supplies to support a previous purchase. An agent who can immediately identify the owned product, the item needed, and simply confirms a shipping address? That's an agent that earns a customer's loyalty. That's what Service Cloud 360 offers - the ability to pull in all customer data to eliminate repeated information gathering.

Streamlined and straightforward assistance

While interactions with agents are important, even self-service and bots need to ensure the customer experience is easy. Chatbots, for instance, are great helpers in reducing call volume, but does the customer feel assisted, or are they jumping through hoops trying to get their needs met?

Service Cloud Einstein levels up chatbots, combining AI with existing customer data to take action for a customer - from claim status to order modification. But Einstein can help human agents provide a better experience, as well. The AI can analyze incoming cases and make predictions, even triggering triage and next-step recommendations and recommending streamlined paths for resolutions to agents.

Conclusion

Customer experience is precisely that - it's the experience your customers have with your brand, product, or services and everyone they interact with. At the end of the day, customers buy a product because they have a need or want to make their lives easier. While snazzy tactics meant to surprise and delight customers sound like a good idea, they don't have the staying power or impact that making a customer's life easier does. Salesforce offers a host of solutions that can help you understand your repeat buyer better while also streamlining interactions and simplifying their experiences.

Of course, this means having the right services and solutions in place with your Salesforce implementation. Six Consulting can help you make that happen. From setting up an integration between your customer service application and SFDC, to completely architecting your Salesforce use to maximize your investment, Six Consulting has the expertise to help you retain customers and keep them coming back for more.