How do you combine customer retention with marketing, sales, and product development?

Scheduling time with existing clients every month, when done right, can be the biggest tool to retain and gain new clients. During those meetings having a plan to not only discuss strategies and products that benefit the client but asking the difficult questions of what's not working and why. Find out what your existing clients need to understand or have to utilize your products in order to gain a relationship that leads to long term business and their word of mouth that adds new clients as well.

The goal of the business development or sales team is to understand the strategic intentions of the client. Armed with that knowledge they can go beyond developing the solution to creating a client transformation. When you approach client retention from this perspective you put yourself in the shoes of the senior executives of your client. By applying critical thinking and creativity to their strategic intentions, you are becoming a partner to their business.

An often missed part of product development is innovation. 80-90% of senior executives want innovation but only 6% are happy with performance. (Source: McKinsey). Innovation needs the right culture for it to flourish, along with budget allocation for resources. Often there is a fear of failure that stops innovation in its tracks. This is why having the right culture that allows for mistakes, reiteration and pivoting is essential.

Customer service teams have a critical role to play. Their challenge is often the response times from other functions to resolve the client's issue at pace. Having a customer-centric approach permeating all functions, with each team member understanding how essential it is, will aid client retain.

Building strong customer service teams starts with an organized plan. Strong leadership with a keen eye on problem solving, relationship building and forecasting what is to come is a necessity.

In my experience helpdesks and chatbots are only useful in delivering excellent service when they meet expectations, and for that it's answering simple questions quickly. My expectation of great customer service is being able to speak to a human being easily when needed and not being directed from chatbot to helpdesk and back again. This does not help retain customers for longer and in fact does the opposite.

In my experience helpdesks and chatbots are only useful in delivering excellent service when they meet expectations, and for that it's answering simple questions quickly. My expectation of great customer service is being able to speak to a human being easily when needed and not being directed from chatbot to helpdesk and back again. This does not help retain customers for longer and in fact does the opposite.

Let's remember that every day there is a silent war on your clients. Other business development and sales teams will be targeting them and trying to entice them from your business to theirs. When you've reached partnership status with your clients and you continue to collaborate on new products together, you shift from transactional to transformational and become integral to their business. Having retained clients for 10+ years, and come close to losing large client accounts, I've Having retained leading brands as clients for 10+ years, I've experienced