Three Strategies to Quickly and Effectively Recover Customers
Customer retention lies at the heart of everything from customer experience (CX) strategies to contact center tactics. Additionally, retaining and recovering existing customers is far more cost-effective for a brand than focusing solely on acquiring new business. Faced with these and other reasons, most brands see the importance of customer recovery and work hard to turn negative experiences into positive ones.
Today we’re going to touch on three proven strategies that can help organizations quickly and effectively resolve issues and recover at-risk customers. Those tactics are as follows:
- Closed-Loop Programs
- Multichannel Listening
- Empowering Employees
Strategy #1: Closed-Loop Programs
As most CX-minded professionals know, closing the loop is an invaluable component of any customer retention effort.
The term “closing the loop” actually refers to two separate processes. The first, sometimes called closing the inner loop, denotes addressing and resolving individual complaints from customers. It should go without saying that closing the inner loop is vital for not just customer retention in general, but also recovering at-risk customers.
Closing the outer loop, by contrast, refers to engaging the entire organization in a holistic, continuous improvement effort. When every person who works for a brand resolves to do so in a way that creates a better experience for customers, organizations can achieve success that carries them to the top of their respective verticals. This also makes customer recovery simpler and more intuitive.
Strategy #2: Multichannel Listening
There was a time when surveys were considered the apex of customer feedback methods, and while they’re certainly still important, they’re no longer the only means by which customers report insights.
In this day and age, customers expect to be able to give feedback however they’d like, and most of the time, that means via social media or with non-text feedback. That’s why it’s important for brands keen on recovering customers to both enable a platform that combs social media for feedback, and allows feedback submissions via image, video, voice and other multimedia methods. This strategy lets customers know that you’re interested in hearing their feedback on their terms, which makes them more receptive to being recovered when a customer care agent responds.
Strategy #3: Empowering Employees
Many brands risk overlooking employees when considering how best to recover customers. Employees aren’t just invaluable for facilitating the customer recovery process—if they have an excellent experience with a brand, they’ll become much more impassioned advocates for that organization in their own right.
Thus, companies that want to more effectively recover employees must consider employee wants, perspectives, and needs (i.e. the employee experience). Providing an improved experience for employees increases their happiness and the quality of their work. That enthusiasm is infectious, and will come across to the customers that those employees are charged with recovering and caring for. This makes empowering employees a great way to recover at-risk customers.
The Recovery Trifecta
As we mentioned up top, customer recovery is essential to brands’ continued success. Companies that strive to close the inner and outer loops, listen to customers where they are and on their terms, and create an improved employee experience are setting themselves up to not just recover customers, but also to achieve meaningful change.
Want to learn more about customer retention and effective customer recovery? Our webinar on this subject with experts Jim Katzman and David Van Brocklin is now available for you to view for free! You can find it here.
