5 Tips to Improve your Customer Retention Rates
Customer retention is on the minds all managed services providers. With rising customer acquisition costs, MSPs need to innovate and assume a proactive role in retaining clients. Here are five tips to help you improve your customer retention rates.
June 15, 2015
By Gina Murphy 1
Customer retention is on the minds all managed services providers. With rising customer acquisition costs, MSPs need to innovate and assume a proactive role in retaining clients.
Here are five tips to help you improve your customer retention rates.
1. Become a Trusted Advisor – It is important to develop relationships early and at all levels within the organization. Understanding your customer’s continuing needs and motivation requires that you have ongoing relationships at all levels of the organization from executives to the front desk superstar. The first sales meetings with the customer are critical relationship builders and will carry forward throughout the customer lifecycle. These relationships are building blocks to the overall strategy of keeping the customer informed and happy.
2. Create a consistent and proactive communication plan – Leverage the quarterly business review (QBR) to showcase the value you bring to the customer, and solidify your role as a trusted advisor. The more value you demonstrate, the more strategic you become to your client. QBRs are quarterly meeting that looks at the existing state of your clients’ business and how you’re helping them reach their goals. It includes a look back at the past quarter and typically includes information on what happened in the last quarter, where were the successes and issues, what were the remedies, and how did your IT solutions perform.
3. Ensure a smooth onboarding process – You want to begin a long term partnership by making sure you begin the relationship as you intend to go on. The key for success is to develop an engagement plan using a high touch process to ensure a smooth onboarding experience during all three phases of the on-boarding process: The Assessment, Transition Plan and Cutover, and Ongoing Performance Analysis. New technologies can require significant changes in business processes, application architectures, technology infrastructure, and operating models that must be properly understood before embarking on any new initiative. Having a well thought out strategy can mean the difference between success and failure.
4. Be willing to customize – Every business has different requirements – there really isn’t a one size fits all business model that actually works. Take for example hybrid cloud computing. The hybrid cloud is now the new normal in cloud computing. The whole point of a hybrid cloud is to design and customize cloud capabilities that address your customer’s unique needs. But today – MSPs typically offer a one-size-fits-all service level agreement. Customers will demand a service provider that is willing and able to customize the service level agreement to meet those unique needs of their organization so that they can take advantage of the flexibility, scalability, cost reductions, and resiliency that cloud computing offers.
5. Expand your expertise and services with strong partnerships -Strong partnerships and alliances with leading technology companies that are recognized as leaders in their respective fields can help you expand your business and meet the needs of your customers. Partnering with technology and software leaders enables you to deliver a variety of solutions to meet your customers’ business needs and helps you to broaden your core service offerings. Through partnerships, you are able to gain expertise and insight to enhance your offerings without having to hire a team of experts.
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