What are the top mistakes brands make that hurt customer retention?

The mistakes that can make customers stop coming back to a brand are not being consistent, not listening to customers, and not keeping promises. Also, if a brand doesn't pay attention to what customers like and don't like, or if they don't treat customers well, that can hurt retention. To keep customers coming back, brands should be reliable, listen to what customers say, and be nice to them. It's like being a good friend – you listen, you're reliable, and you're kind, and that keeps the friendship going.

Every brand needs to have a unique edge that the customers value. It needs to be maintained, enhanced and communicated consistently. This is only possible through taking customer feedback, consumer research, monitoring brand health and a consistent marketing strategy.

One of the top mistakes brands commit that jeopardizes customer retention is overlooking the post-purchase experience. While much focus is placed on customer acquisition, post-sale relationship nurturing often takes a backseat. Customers expect ongoing support, regular communication, and recognition after purchase. If they feel neglected or face unresolved issues, they're quick to jump ship and turn to more attentive competitors. In today's digital era, negative experiences reverberate quickly on social media, impacting not just the concerned customer but a broader audience. By emphasizing the entire customer journey, brands can bolster loyalty, minimizing churn and maximizing lifetime customer value.

One mistake is ignoring the nuances that exist across different consumer cohorts. Most brands market to a general population vs. recognizing the ethnic and cultural differences that exist and that are becoming increasingly important.

Sometimes, in an effort to grow faster, brands can tend to cater more to new customers vs keep on delighting current ones. What I have realized is that it's worth investing in current clients as much if not more than get new ones.

There is nothing more powerful than combining a Brand's intrinsic positioning promise with a sales or customer facing assistant who has an "altruistic" brand affinity. For example, an outdoor enthusiast who enjoys hiking who sells an appropriate hiking shoe brand in a lifestyle store. Spend as much time motivating and turning your staff into brand ambassadors as you do on customer retention and acquisition strategies. Happy staff will lead to happy customers!

More critically, take the Contact Center feedback, analyze it, break it down into natural categories, funnel it back to internal teams to understand root cause, create tickets or roadmap items and then relentlessly focus on prioritizing and closing them out. Rinse and repeat for other voice of customer channels.

Just think of QANTAS. The national carrier, an Australian icon, a leading global airline. Then they started appealing to their shareholders, ignored their customers and what they needed. The fallout has damaged the brand significantly, maybe irreparably. Look at everything that QANTAS did then do the opposite. Start with asking customers what they want, then work out how best you can deliver it.

The mistake of underperforming here can potentially ruin all work put into brand building, positioning and everything else. If a brand can't respect and value the relationship it has to its clients and customers, nothing else matters.

Agreed, often when resolving customer issues companies tend to look only at the one situation at hand, rather than considering a customer’s past loyalty and potential for future engagement. While you might save a few dollars by offering limited support and minimal compensation to address a specific situation, you’re likely going to miss out on future loyalty and revenue by not living up to customer expectations.

Feedback from customers is valuable since it provides insight into their perceptions about the brand. By understanding customer feedback and insights we can identify potential bottlenecks and timely process interventions can be implemented to help improve services and business processes.

I think the problem is that customer feedback is filtered to fit boxes and pre-coded answers and no one gets it until it’s too late. Monitoring social media may give you a better and more realistic read!

In my experience, in the PR and communications industry, ignoring customer feedback has two major business implications, among others: 1) Loss of existing business/client, resulting in revenue loss 2) Harming the agency's reputation, in the long run damaging the potential of acquiring new clients Listening to customer feedback on the other hand can: 1) Help ensure we make them feel heard by addressing their pain points 2) Help identify newer offerings, in case current services are unable to address client needs. In turn, we are able to strengthen our value proposition to be able to win more clients This has been possible through a structured feedback mechanism and relevant expertise involvement!

How many times have we experienced an irritation and found no way to report something directly to a company? No direct access to a brand custodian I’ve had experiences where I’ve reported a sub par experience at a franchise and ‘customer service’ gets the franchise itself to look into the problem without so much as being a part of the redressal process directly. Even had Instances of reporting spurious products (abrasive soaps, weird chemical tasting breads) with not one of these firms asking back for the product to check and see what was wrong. Big brands mind you. An eagerness to source, identify and troubleshoot customer grievances from all touch points-pre sales, sales and after sales needs some emphasis too in a brand’s framework

The Silent Impact of Neglect Overlooking customer feedback is akin to sailing without a compass. While brands may have a vision, customer feedback fine-tunes the direction. In a connected world, word spreads fast. Ignoring feedback not only hampers product evolution but also taints brand image. Feedback isn't just critique; it's a roadmap to refinement. Every overlooked review can equate to lost business opportunities. Moreover, in an era where personalization is paramount, disregarding feedback diminishes chances of tailored experiences. Brands that sidestep feedback risk market irrelevance and eroded trust.

Brands struggle with inconsistency for a few reasons: Great branding requires standing out, which is risky. Many companies don't fully commit to consistent brand strategies and messaging in order to minimize risk. Unfortunately, this leads to brands being forgettable or, worse, inconsistent and confusing. ??Additionally, branding is often mistakenly seen as just logos, messaging, and colors when it's actually a reputation — the perception that lives in customers' minds. You want a good reputation, and most companies are on board with this, but figuring out how to stand out where they go wrong. This balancing act makes consistency challenging, especially when companies have a low threshold for risk and back out too early to see the impacts.

For me, this is the big one. Consistent brands are trusted brands. It’s really that simple. But for many businesses, they find it hard to hold their nerve when times get tough. Staying true to the brand, which often includes creative and primary messaging, is key.

The market landscape is insanely noisy. With the volume of content and messages customers get hit with on a daily basis it's really hard for your brand to stand out without consistent communication over a long period of time. For an internal team that sees the same messaging and visuals every day for months it's natural to think your audience will get bored...but that's probably right about the time when you're going to break through. Great brands (big and small) develop a strong message, identity, and character and stick with it.

Inconsistent branding is a mistake that harms customer retention. It confuses customers and damages your brand's reputation. To avoid this, establish and follow a brand style guide for consistent branding across all channels and materials.

The goal is to be objectively “better” across a particular dimension deemed to have value in the mind of the buyer. Since no business is "the best" at everything, we need to be strategic when picking those battles. That means going after a buyer profile that makes the most sense for our particular business. Typically, we’re looking for a customer that’s profitable, with a long retention, and one that gets the most value from what we’re selling - resulting in high word-of-mouth. This typically boils down to three options: 1) Increase the tangible customer value of our product, across the dimensions buyers see as important 2) Review ways to reduce costs - as long as they don’t negatively impact customer experience 3) Or..do both (!)

There are no excuses here. Perfect your email marketing. You can retain customers and expand their LTV. We have seen some remarkable results when you really delve into the mind of your customers and give them more of what they like.

Brands often neglect customers by not obsessing over their needs, complicating processes and failing to innovate on the customer's behalf. Customers have evolving needs, so whether your product is mature or early-stage, a critical aspect to retention is high levels of customer engagement. This engagement should not only be about advertising new products or features, but it should be 2-way, where brand is listening intently for feedback on ways to delight customers and invent on their behalf. At AWS, we strive for this under our leadership principles "Customer Obsession" and "Invent and Simplify". By consistently engaging customers, innovating to meet their demands and simplifying processes, brands can foster loyalty & long-lasting growth.

The top mistakes brands make that hinder customer retention include neglecting personalized experiences, leading to disengagement; poor communication, which can either frustrate customers or leave them feeling overwhelmed; ignoring valuable customer feedback, missing opportunities for improvement; and providing inconsistent product or service quality, eroding trust and loyalty. Consistency, tailored interactions, effective communication, and responsiveness to feedback are essential factors in maintaining strong customer retention.

51% of consumers say the best way for a brand to be memorable is to respond to their comments and messages. Social media has allowed brands to be in direct contact with their consumers. This means consumers have new expectations of their relationships with their favorite brands. Engagement builds those relationships.

Neglecting customer engagement is a mistake that harms customer retention. It leads to disinterest and decreased brand commitment. To avoid this, implement a customer engagement strategy focused on building lasting relationships through personalized communication, rewards, content, and involvement.

Measuring retention allows brands to prioritize their most valuable customers. Gaining insights into the habits of their most valuable customers can help brands grow that customer base. Take those insights and develop marketing activities that target similar customers for lead gen. Retention is also a great indicator of customer lifetime value. Have CLTR is a very important metric to have to predict the value of a brand's customer base over time.

Not measuring retention is like driving blindfolded. Without metrics, brands miss vital clues about customer disengagement. Ignoring retention metrics means missing feedback opportunities, which are crucial for improvement. Moreover, without these metrics, predicting future growth is challenging. Brands that measure retention show they value customer experiences, building trust. In today's age, retention metrics help in tailoring personalized experiences. Ignoring this not only hinders growth but strains customer relationships.

Data may not be exciting to most folks, but there's a reason why marketers will defend data collection from campaigns. Especially return customers. This information tells you whether or not you're a service or good that people want to return to. It can help identify painpoints in the customer journey, and more than anything it can tell you whether your product or service has a future. Eventually you will run out of customers if you don't have return ones.

Remember that retention rates might looks tidy but can be hiding a mess you don't know about. You need to ask yourself about acquisition strategies at the same time. If your new customers were brought in by heavy promotions, almost too good to be true discounts or promises that your products won't be able to fulfill, your retention programs are just going to be trying to take out the trash. You get what you pay for in this life, especially when it comes to the quality of your customer base. Spend the time looking at those who are quick to leave and figure out if they were worth bringing in or, even better, worth saving. That's my advice.

Several quick thoughts for consideration: - Compare acquisition cohorts over time, the frequency of your cohorts (weekly, monthly, annually, etc.) should reflect the typical transaction or billing cycle. Cohort comparisons can be telling of internal (e.g. CX policy shifts) or external (e.g. new competition) factors. Combine with voice of the consumer feedback to tell the story. - Retention analytics are a big step towards calculating and understanding customer lifetime value (LTV), a necessary metric for understanding consumer profitability, when combined with transactional frequency and value. - Understand top and bottom quartile/decile/etc. reasoning for retention, or lack thereof. Make middle deciles see the value of your top decile

For me, it's failure to leverage the tools they're already paying for. Most organizations are using Marketing and Sales platforms, but few are using them to their full potential. This is often the result of functional siloes and a lack of collaborative processes. Today, we (that's the collective "we") have amazing tools that allow us to perform more marketing and sales functions at scale — but we don't always make use of them.

Many valuable points have already been raised, so I’d like to focus on the fact that it’s normal for brands to experience some degree of customer loss. A zero customer defection rate is unrealistic. Even the most consistent brands naturally lose some customers but simultaneously gain new ones due to their strong brand identity and market presence. However, it’s crucial for brands to continuously strive to minimize customer churn by understanding the root causes of defection, while also acknowledging that a certain level of natural loss occurs independently of the brand’s market strength.

As a brand strategist. a common misstep I've seen many brands make is copying the look and feel of other successful brands outside of their industry. This is hugely problematic because successful brand strategies are meticulously tailored to that brand's unique identity and target audience. Brands invests extensively in research, ensuring their strategy aligns with their mission, values, and culture. Brands should conduct their own research, focusing on understanding their unique identity and tailoring strategies to resonate with their audience and goals. Copying a look and feel from another brand is like putting on the wrong shoe for an activity. A slide is cool, but does it work on a hike? Nah.