Written by S. Thompson | Posted in Business |

Are the number of repeat sales to your customers decreasing over time? Chances are you need to look into what customer retention strategies will work for your business. This article goes through four major approaches that have been traditionally proven to work well.

Begin by improving the level of service you provide to customers. Any of your sales representatives or service staff need to have adequate training in how to professionally and politely deal with customers. This is especially true of handling complaints and dealing with customers for the first time (to establish that good first impression). Simply by improving the level of service you can improve customer retention and customer loyalty.

Next, try to gain as much customer feedback as possible. There are several ways of doing this. Online versions include looking up blog comments, social media and online surveys. More traditional methods include market research and questionnaires. All of these approaches can be used to gain valuable feedback about what works and what doesn’t work, in the view of your customer. Make executive decisions to alter your products appropriately or refactor customer retention strategies to target specific customer segments (e.g. through follow-up calls/surveys).

One of the simpler customer retention strategies that needs to be established early on is the use of CRM systems (customer relationship management). This should be part of your business intelligence strategy to be constantly storing and maintaining customer information. As the company grows then this data becomes invaluable for starting up loyalty schemes, sending out follow-up e-mails, providing special offers, sending out thank you notes, etc. Without CRM these customer retention techniques/schemes become more difficult to manage.

Finally, establish repeated contact with your customer base through ongoing sales. The more times you sell your product to a customer, date greater the ongoing relationship is between the customer and your product. This can build up over time and establish a purchasing habit they will not wish to break.

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• Sales representatives customer retention strategies