Did you know it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer than it does to retain existing ones? Also, businesses have a 60-70% probability of selling to an existing customer compared with 5-20% probability of selling to a new one. For small business owners, the importance of customer retention and service renewals cannot be understated. CEOs and CFOs are shifting their focus from managing day-to-day tasks to ensuring customer satisfaction levels are high. This is especially crucial for fledging field service businesses that want to stand out from the crowd. What can businesses do to drive customer renewals and in turn profitability? Let’s take a look at some key focus areas.
Improving Customer Experience
When you break it down to the basics, customers are more likely to renew if they are satisfied with the level of service. If you see your rate of renewals dropping, you may need to get more insights into key metrics like customer behaviour, service quality, and product quality. Ask yourself questions like “Which are the critical stages of customer behaviour I need to track?”, or “Are there any post-service mishaps that are leaving clients less than satisfied with the quality of service?”. By putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, you can quickly identify pain points and steer your organization on the right track.
Harness the Power of Predictive Software
When you’re looking at data that tells you how likely a customer is going to choose your service over a competitor’s, there are a lot of important parameters that need to be analysed, such as customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (CLV). While tracking such metrics manually might seem like a hard task, we fortunately have access to predictive software that can analyse customer behaviour and provide actionable insights that will help you make smarter business decisions. This will help you better estimate costs and plan for business expansion.
Ensure Payment Systems are Seamless
Small business, especially in the field service sector, can take years to build strong market credibility. However, even a tiny mistake like a common billing error can lead to a huge setback by damaging your company’s reputation. Poor business practices like manual data entry, inflexible timelines, and slow payment processing are primary causes for customers to have a poor payment experience. You can avoid such discrepancies by implementing flexible billing systems and processes for your various revenue streams. And when closing on new customers, it becomes essential to offer a seamless billing experience from billing to payment.
Maintain a Centralised Customer Record
Customer data is an important asset for field service companies, and ensuring your team has seamless access to customer data will keep processes running at high efficiency. When it comes to what kind of data, every recordable interaction from transactions to conversations gives access to valuable insights. Your customer-facing staff is empowered to provide high-quality support and can foresee issues, allowing them to adopt a pre-emptive approach.
Implementing these steps will require you to carefully relook at your business operations. Customer satisfaction is the lifeblood of any service organisation and keeping this high will ultimately ensure your growth is consistent.
