Leverage customer expertise and feedback

Your customers can be a wealth of knowledge for your business. Tapping into their insights and opinions will help them feel valued, especially if they see that they are having an impact on your business direction and product strategy.

9. Gather customer feedback (and action it)

One of the easiest ways to leverage your customers is to collect customer feedback. Timely, accurate customer feedback will tell you exactly how your customers feel about your products and services, and help you spot any areas that may be impacting retention. A customer feedback loop, where you collect, analyse, and share customer feedback inside your organisation, will help you action your findings.

There are many ways to collect customer feedback including surveys, beta testing, Net Promoter Score®, customer communities, and focus groups.

10. Create customer advisory boards

Customer advisory boards are a powerful way to engage customers and strengthen your relationship, while delivering value on both sides. Usually consisting of senior decision makers in your customer organizations, these forums give the opportunity for customers to share important insights, weigh in on aspects of your strategy and product development, and discuss their priorities and challenges. 

11. Inform products and services

Your customers can also impact your product development. This might be directly, through asking them about their needs, goals, and product features they’d like to see. Or it might be indirectly, through listening to sentiment on social media or looking for trends in comments in a community. This will allow you to shape your products and services to meet your customers’ exact needs — making it more likely they’ll pick you over a competitor.

This approach also enables you to remain on top of their needs as they evolve. So your business remains relevant to them for many years.

Bring it all together in one platform

The best thing you can do is bring all of your retention tactics together into one platform, from your communications to your feedback and networking.  

Having a single platform puts everyone on the same page. Your customers know where to go to engage with your brand and your employees have a place where they can consistently work to retain more customers. Communities can offer a wealth of first party data to help you better meet customer needs, and this will inform things like a customer retention strategy and product development.