7 Ways Retailers Can Reduce Customer Churn

For years, retailers have been primarily focused on customer acquisition. But in the long term, growing your revenue without effective customer retention can prove to be unsustainable. Customer churn is a key indicator when measuring the impact of retention efforts.

Churn stands for the number of customers leaving a company during a given period. In other words, churn occurs when a customer stops buying from a company.

Customer churn can have a severe impact on your business as it lowers revenues and profits. If you want to keep your customers, then you need to address this issue. Predicting and preventing customer churn can become a significant additional revenue source for every retailer. This article discusses the ways to drive customer loyalty and prevent customers from leaving.

Get to know your customers better

There’re many reasons why customers leave. One of them is the mismatch between what you offer your customers and what they’re looking for. It’s highly important to understand their pains and needs and be able to address them.

The better you realize who your customers are, the more accurately you’ll meet their expectations, and the better their experience will be. Customer satisfaction polls are a great tool to get some insights into their preferences. Another way to improve your product positioning is to convey exit interviews to determine why customers are leaving.

Improve CX throughout the funnel

According to the statistics, poor customer experience has prevented 78% of customers from making a purchase. This is why delivering a great customer experience is crucial if you’re willing to keep high retention rates.

To devise a comprehensive CX strategy, you’ll need to analyze the complete customer journey — from the arrival to store (whether online or offline) to the post-purchase communication — and determine weak points and opportunities.

68% of customers leave because they think a company doesn’t care about them.

Personalize shopping experience

Today’s customers expect a personalized experience when they are shopping — what’s more, once limited to targeted offers, personalization now extends to the entire customer experience.

The cornerstone of a personalized shopping experience is intelligent data management, which involves gathering the correct data from your customers, analyzing it, and incorporating it into your campaigns and customer interactions.

Enhance brand communications

Another way to reduce the churn rate is to actively engage your customers with your brand. To do so, it’s essential to monitor and advance the quality of communications across all available channels. An effective brand communications strategy involves getting to know your audience, coining the right messages, and delivering those messages on the right channels.

Apart from developing channels targeted at broad audiences, like social media or websites, it’s also important to deliver personalized experiences through emails, apps, or messengers. Notify your customers of delivery status, current or upcoming promos, special offers, discounts, or personalized goods selections.

Collect feedback

68% of customers leave because they think a company doesn’t care about them. To avoid this mistake, make sure to establish a good relationship with your customers.

One of the effective ways is to collect feedback. You can use plenty of tools, from long survey forms and in-depth interviews to short in-app surveys, phone calls, or suggestions to rate recent purchasing experience.

Support anytime, anywhere

Prompt, professional, and effective customer support can become your competitive advantage and lower churn rate. According to Forum Corporation’s research, poor customer service is the main reason for customers leaving.

Make sure your customers can reach you through multiple communication channels (calls, email, messengers). Consider improving response times, ensuring 24/7 customer support availability, and multilanguage support if you operate on international markets.

Automate processes

Business process automation is becoming more and more popular, given the challenges, retailers have to face — rising labor costs, demand for personalized experiences, and increasing customer expectations.

It is no wonder that brands embrace conversational AI as an extremely powerful tool for marketing, sales, and retention — it can provide a highly personalized approach along with prompt and less expensive solutions that make the customer experience more satisfying.

Let’s look at some possible scenarios of incorporating AI into your operations.

Order processing and tracking

You can use AI to automate the entire purchase flow — from confirming the order and negotiating shipment date and location to sending updates on the status and dealing with returns.