How do you retain customers using tools and platforms?

I use a simple & fundamental approach to this - GPCT Goals, Plans, Challenges & Timeline. This helps me to understand my customers much better and advise them on the relevant solutions. HubSpot has tools such as Growth Grader for long-term planning, quick wins and help determine product fit.

Maintaining the integrity & quality of our service, crafting personalized content for our audience, creating user-friendly websites and uncompromising customer service.

Turn data into a catalyst for delightful experiences. Identify patterns that illuminate opportunities for enhancement. Use this data-driven approach not just to meet but to exceed expectations.

Don't get carried away. If you boiled it down to two simple questions: 1. How does my customer make revenue? 2. How does our products & services contribute? That needs to be at the heart of what you do for your customer. Everything else is fluff.

Go deep on discovery in the beginning. Have a detailed documented success plan. And remember - retention never stops. I recommend documenting what causes churn and loyalty within your business and build alerts off of that. You can create custom workflows in salesforce or leverage customer success specific tools/platforms.

Master the art of content creation to consistently captivate your audience. Utilize diverse platforms—email, social media, webinars, podcasts—to share compelling stories. Offer valuable information, product insights, and educational content.

Connect with your customers in meaningful ways. In a time when communication can overwhelm us, silence the noise and focus on the quality of your interactions.

Tools and platforms are useful to retain more customers, however a common pitfall is when they're implemented without clear use cases. Create your plan off the back of your customer strategy. This plan should leverage people, process, data and the technology to increase retention. And when the planning is implemented well, it'll leverage technology to its advantage. Segmentation, personalisation and automation are three core areas that drive customer experience and engagement. Ideally these three are delivered off a single customer view for a unified customer experience too. Along the way, ensure that measurement of objectives and key results are planned and delivered frequently too.

Customer education is a key practice in engaging with your customers. Educating and leading with value regarding your products and services. Customer education should span the whole flywheel: attracting them initially as a customer, engaging with them during the sales process, and delighting them after they become a customer. Customers who engage with education are more lightly to retain as a customer - a Credentials program will only add to this value and keep them coming back for more.

Engagement has moved from 1:1 to 1:many. As companies mature, they have more customers and can no longer facilitate as many 1:1 interactions. So, focus your 1:1 on the most critical segments that need the attention. Then create consistent 1:many programs that your customers can rely on.

Proactively anticipate customer needs. Implement chatbots and self-service portals that address common queries before they become problems.

We all know that retaining a customer is more cost effective than acquiring a new customer. With the advancement of AI in 2023, it's never been more cost effective to support our customers. Remember that our customers are more than their customer ID. We need to ensure their experience is well rounded. And if a customer has a bad experience, do the work to turn them from a detractor to a promoter. It may feel like hard work at the time, but the ROI in doing so is often a significant increase in brand advocacy and customer value.

While helping your customer with the right setup, configuration in your product is paramount... don't forget that your product lives within their ecosystem. What workflows does your product fit within? Where does data come in from and go out to? Those are questions that need to be consistently answered.

Microlearning is a great way to support your customers throughout their journey with you. Meet them where they are provide the short/quick answers to problems, recommendations in real-time on how to implement your product or service, and collect feedback on where they have continued problems you can solve for them.

Customers value quality and speed. Thankfully, developments in AI are optimizing the ability to support customers with high quality context, accuracy, and speed. Emerging tools powered by AI are making this possible.

Make sure that the renewal isn't a gotcha moment. Don't talk about it too early and don't talk about it too late. And certainly don't surprise them with an increase they weren't expecting.

Be clear on how you measure customer retention. Ensure it's aligned to organisational goals and get clarity on how much a retained customer is worth over a period of time. Customer headroom is a valuable analysis to undertake. Score a customer based on predicted spend and spend last year vs what they've spent this year. When headroom is clearly understood, the business can sign off on initiatives to close the headroom down, ultimately delivering a more engaged customer base, delivering revenue and profit to the bottom line.

Measuring customer retention is your organization can tap into a few different components. Two areas I focus on are Customer Dollar Retention and Revenue Retention and identify the core activities that contribute to the increase in both of these. For HubSpot, HubSpot Academy consumption contributes positively to both of these metrics in which we then dive further into and explore satisfaction, patterns, and opportunities to serve our customers better.

Some of my favorite metrics include: ?? Customer Effort Score ?? Customer Advocacy Score ?? CSAT Tracking churn reasons will also have a huge impact on retention if you take quality action on the feedback.

Always be learning is a principle in which the HubSpot Academy team lives by. Always exploring new ways of doing things and asking good questions to further define our strategy. One way in which we do this is asking questions to our community and finding others that we can learn from within our industry through forums, networking, and socializing content across platforms.

Choosing the right tools is a challenging task. There are many options out there that cover multiple use cases but don't fall into the trap of purchasing what everyone else purchases, or what Gartner recommends. Get clear on your own business needs. Understand your stakeholder and business requirements. Speak to finance, operations and other areas of the business to get buy in before assessing your top 3 vendors. Only when you have all ducks in a row, your business case signed off and your budget locked in should you proceed. Also note that signing off on Capex and Opex isn't enough. You need to ensure budget is in place for training, upskilling, community building, process change, project management and more.