Information technology services are an abundance of diverse services and products and industries have become aggressively competitive. Companies want to increase revenues and expand, aim to attract new customers and partners while retaining their existing ones. 

More than 60% of IT Product companies treat “existing customers’ renewals” as a high priority. Because, retaining an existing customer is 5x-25x less expensive than acquiring a new one.

But to do that, companies need to maintain a strategy to make their customers happy and should develop customer oriented philosophy. Companies must maintain the customer data and what services or products are being offered to them or were offered to them in the past. 

Today, with the help of advanced analytics tools and AI/ML algorithms, we can analyse the behaviour and patterns of the customers and ultimately provide them more personalized tools and solutions which can increase the ROI of their business. 

If customers are happy and are growing exponentially, chances are high that your business will also grow along with the client and if customers are not able to add value, it may result in losing the customer. 

Adding new clients can open new avenues for the business but building many strategies just to acquire the new customers, keeping the existing customers away from the priority list could be a disaster for business.

Market Surveys and findings

• A study by Harvard Business School found that increasing customer retention by even 5% can increase profits by 25–95%. 
• Some studies have shown that repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers.
• A HubSpot survey found that companies that put data at the core of their marketing/sales decisions improved marketing ROI by 15–20%.
• Around 68% of customers stop doing business with a company due to feeling that the company was indifferent toward them.

Retention Strategies:

• Understanding Customers

It is very important and must for any company to understand their customers and their requirements. If your software isn’t meeting a need customers won’t stick around for long. At the same time you need to train your customers to understand what you have offered to them, many times customers stop using the solutions/products offered to them because they don’t understand the product and how to use it or might be missing some key functions and they move to alternative options. 

Once you get to understand the customer and their requirements, you can walk with them hand in hand and provide the most effective solution at each stage and improve the customer retention process. 

• Strategic planning

To retain the customers, one needs to build strategies around it and implement it as per the plan. Each customer might be different and has their own way of doing business, for each customer strategy might vary depending on the nature of business. You must gather the data for that client and should be ready with the facts and reasons that how new product or service will be helpful for them.

• Post-Sales marketing

Maintaining a post sales communication and cross selling is important and it happens only when you have good cross selling strategies. Advanced churn modeling using predictive analytics is a powerful tool for maximizing business intelligence – understanding why customers leave, identifying customers who are on the verge of leaving, and proactively respond with retention tactics to reduce churn.

• Trust & Relationship

Trust has been viewed as one of the significant factors in having longer relationships with clients. Delivering the right solutions which actually increases the ROI of the customers and drives them to the next era gives confidence to the customers and turns into long term relations. 

Relations with the customers are based on the performance and engagement, how you deliver the solution and the way the team interacts with them. The obtained results indicate that customer satisfaction strongly influences customer retention, whereas customer retention can affect customer loyalty.

• Service Quality

Service quality is one of most important aspects in building relations with the client, it doesn’t matter how frequently you interact with clients or how many calls you do have or how many times you go over coffee with clients but if delivery is poor, the end result will be zero. 

So ultimately, delivery speaks what you are and validates the commitments done with the client. That’s why most of the companies now focus equally on the delivery of the product with expected quality and on time.

• Minimize downtime

This is the time when you strengthen the relations deeply with customers in information technology. In case of an outage or breakdown, if you stand with them head to head and manage to recover them from severe damage, it will put the best impression on the client. You should be more prompt in such cases and minimize the downtime as much as possible.

• Predictive Analytics & Personalization

Use of AI/ML today is helpful in analyzing the customer data and helping you to understand the patterns and behaviour of the customer. These tools can be really helpful in making predictions that for specific needs how you can give a tailor made solution to the customer. 

More personalized experience will get you closer to the customer and would be able to make a good impression in the customer’s good book.

Conclusion

Customer retention is becoming the most important tool for organizations to increase their revenues with less effort as well as secure more profits. But it requires that you need to maintain a healthy relationship with the client and help them grow. Its vice-versa process, if your customers will grow, they will be able to give you more business and in case of losses you will lose the accounts.