With businesses looking at ways to reduce their overheads and adjust to the economic climate we thought it was a good time for us to revisit customer retention. We previously looked at ways of reducing customer churn in an earlier blog post of ours.

In this article we look at the strategies you can put into place to help reduce customer churn:

1. Educate your customers.

You’ve probably talked about running training or webinars for your customers for some time. Now is the time to act and engage. Your customers have more options available to them than ever before, and if they find a competitor of yours with a similar offering and price that seems more exciting, you could lose them.

Run webinars or 121 training sessions from you and your team to help keep your customers close to you.

2. Speak to your customers

MSP’s often develop strong, long-term relationships with their customers. They solidify these relationships with rapid response times and service-level agreements (SLAs).

During this time, there may have been a lot of communication back and forth about working remotely, but not necessarily about your service. 

Customer satisfaction surveys – or just picking up the phone to your primary contact – gives your customers an opportunity to express what is going right, and more importantly, what is going wrong. You can identity and act where customers aren’t happy with the service.

3. Customer Advisory Board

Your most loyal customers are also your most valuable ones. Not just because of the money they spend, but also for the information they provide. They tell you why they love your MSP so much and make suggestions as to where you can improve it. 

Creating a panel of these customers can help you fine-tune products and services at your MSP. Additionally, you can increase customer advocacy by encouraging participants to publicly share their reviews. Customer testimonials are an effective method for building rapport when attracting and engaging potential leads.

4. Communication Calendar

Even if your customers aren’t reaching out with feedback, your team should be proactive with its communication.

If customers haven’t interacted with your MSP for a while, you should reach out to them and re-establish your relationship. Consider adopting a communication calendar to manage customer engagements and create opportunities to upsell and cross-sell.

A communication calendar is a chart that keeps track of customer communication. It tells you the last time that a customer has reached out and alerts you when existing customers haven’t interacted with your MSP.

This makes it easy to launch promotional offers and proactive customer service features that remove roadblocks before customers know they’re there. For example, if a customer’s subscription is set to expire, you can send out an email letting them know they need to renew their account.

5. Customer Education Programme

A customer education programme demonstrates a long-term investment in your customer base. Under this initiative, your MSP can create a variety of customer self-service tools like a knowledge base and a community forum. Then, customers use these features to locate solutions to service problems before reaching out to your support team. 

This programme can extend beyond your service desk as well. For example, you can run education programmes on the products and services you sell such as Microsoft Office 365, Phone Systems or Cyber Security. Helping customers with free training will help build your relationship with them.

Whilst many businesses are home working, there has never been a better time to engage them with strategies that can help keep and grow them as customers.