In the not-so-distant-past of doing business, it was often believed that the more customers a business had, the better. While this may be true to some extent, today businesses are quickly pivoting from customer acquisition to customer retention strategies.
And franchises are no different. In this article, we explore what this means for your business as a franchisee, why it’s important and share actionable strategies you can follow to help your business grow.
Let’s begin.
What is customer retention?
Customer or client retention is a set of strategies that franchise and other businesses follow to ensure that their current customers continue to return to the business in the future.
These customers choose the business over and over again for their products or services because of something special — be it great customer service, excellent and frequent discounts, good value for money accompanied by exceptional attention to detail and care and more.
A franchisee’s customer retention rate is an essential metric to monitor for several reasons. Below, we explore why customer loyalty is important for any entrepreneur.
Why is customer loyalty important?
Retaining existing customers is good for business. When you encourage and foster customer loyalty, you are essentially encouraging word-of-mouth referrals that bring more business your way. These referrals also help your business grow with a real and tangible impact on your bottom line.
When you have happy and loyal customers, you are also spending considerably less on new customer acquisition strategies, leading to cost savings for the business. You can also boost your brand recognition among prospective clients, improve your business’ reputation in the industry and foster greater brand awareness.
But that’s not all. Customer loyalty can help reduce your churn rate while increasing sales. It also presents the perfect opportunity for up-selling and cross-selling, making it a valuable focus for any business that aims to thrive in a competitive landscape.
What are the key factors of customer retention?
Customer retention is characterised by several key factors. These include but aren’t limited to some of the following:
- Incentivising loyalty
- Gathering insights and feedback
- Providing an excellent customer service
- Boosting the value a customer receives from your business
- Encouraging repeat business
- Creating a community
- Boosting engagement and referrals
- And more.
How to increase customer retention as a franchisee
Whether you offer products or services as part of your franchise business, there are a few actionable customer retention strategies you can implement almost immediately to see results on your business’ bottom line. A few worth mentioning include:
1. Build relationships with your customers
Start by getting to know your customers and building relationships by name. No customer wants to feel like just another anonymous face in your store or office. That’s why you should take the time to learn their names, interests and more information about their family and life.
Every person has a need to be heard and recognised and by giving them this opportunity, they’ll feel the warm and welcome environment you’ve created and will want to keep coming back for more. Sometimes, it’s as simple as saying “Hi John, how’s the family doing?”
Being genuinely interested and showing authenticity truly pays off. Don’t forget to show a friendly demeanour and to always listen carefully to what your customer says. There may be nuggets of gold in their conversations with you and/or your staff.
2. Offer a service that’s unbeatable on quality
You don’t just want to be known as the friendly business down the road. You also want to be known as a business that is unbeatable in terms of a quality product or service offering.
This means making sure that every client touchpoint is carefully assessed beforehand and that you offer them a quality experience at each of these touchpoints.
3. Focus on excellence in customer service
There are many reasons why customers would like to get in touch with your business. Sometimes, it may be a question they need answered. In other cases, they may need more serious assistance. Whichever situation you are dealing with, you must ensure that your customer service team is ready to help in a friendly and professional way that leaves a lasting favourable impression.
To make this happen, ensure that you don’t keep customers waiting. If they have an issue, be sure that they don’t have to repeat it eight times to different customer service team members. Aim to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
Also, engage in active listening and confirm the problem before offering a solution. Aim to personalise their experience with your business as opposed to making them feel like customer number 1,379 on your waiting list.
4. Marketing
When you plan your marketing strategy, ensure hyper-personalization across all channels that you use.
For example, your marketing emails should contain your customer’s first name and they should be written in a friendly and encouraging tone of voice while avoiding sounding robotic or distant, which means you’ll end up in their inbox’s trash bin or spam folder.
Social media posts should offer value at every step of the way. And the same is true for blog articles, infographics, podcasts, videos or any other marketing method of communication that you use.
5. Loyalty programmes and incentives
Make your customers feel valued by offering them incentives through different loyalty programmes. For instance, you may reward them with a discount for every 10 purchases they make. Alternatively, you can give them something special for every new referral they bring in.
Loyalty programmes can make customers feel as though they’re part of an in-group, encouraging a sense of belonging and encouraging them to continue supporting your business.
6. Leverage the power of technology
There’s something special to be said about the power of technology in fostering customer loyalty. It can include something like implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system that keeps track of all client interactions.
This can enable one employee to pick up where the last one left off without the customer needing to repeat an issue that needs to be resolved.
It’s also a great way to capture data about your customers, such as birthdays or special anniversaries, when you can reward them and make them feel like a part of a valued community.
There are many tools and technologies you can use to also gather data and use it by analysing it and learning from it to help you create an even better customer experience.
7. Gather feedback and use it to improve
Use surveys and polls and engage in active listening to find areas where your business can improve based on customer feedback.
By taking the time to implement new approaches to how you do business, you show your customers that you care about and value their input. Ultimately, this feedback can help you remain competitive and boost customer loyalty.
8. Participate in local events
And last but not least, you might consider participating in local events to show that you’re not just there for your bottom line but that you’re actively engaged in your community and that you care about its people.
Being local means being a community member and this means getting to know and supporting your fellow community members. The community fabric will strengthen and you’ll gain greater visibility while driving more business your way.
Today, customers are actively seeking businesses with a greater purpose than the profit motive. So, supporting important local causes is not just a way to get greater brand visibility but is also a great way to solidify your business’ reputation.
Conclusion
In wrapping up, we hope you’ve found these insights on building customer loyalty and strengthening your customer retention strategies useful. As a franchisee, these are key defining elements that can set you apart from the crowd.
And if you’re still mulling over which franchise opportunity is right for you, becoming a franchisee with the Belvoir Franchise Group is an option that is seriously worth considering.
With immeasurable levels of support in a highly lucrative industry, all you need to do is get in touch with our friendly team to find out more. We’re here for you every step of the way and are ready to assist.
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