It is reported that 61% of small and mid-sized businesses found that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat customers rather than new business. You should not ignore the future revenue potential of an existing customer. There are some distinct advantages in strengthening relationships with current customers. A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%. The advantages of existing customers are: Important for up-selling and cross-selling opportunities; Less focused on price than new customers; Already confident and trusting in your ability to solve their problems; and often willing to become brand ambassadors. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems can help you to move prospects from lead to close by a simple dashboard adjustment. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/use-your-crm-application-to-build-repeat-customer-sales-78814

There are many ways in which a first-time customer will feel enticed to be a full-time customer and maintain a long relationship with the company. One should understand the profile of the typical customer of the company and segment the group both geographically and demographically. Giving customer's a positive experience by accurately replying to their queries goes a long way. Companies should understand that customer retention is much more than the cost incurred in the advertising campaigns. While offering subscription information, companies should keep in mind not to cost their customers anything. Rather, moving subscriptions to social media can reach thousands customers within minutes. Hence social media posts should be updated according to the customers interests. Read more at :

https://www.smartdatacollective.com/customer-feedback-data-analysis-keys-good-customer-retention-rate/

Email marketing is the best way to turn one-time shoppers into loyal, long-term customers and that’s the reason why 80% of brands rely on it to drive customer retention, and another 56% of them say email marketing is the most effective way to reach retention goals. It is proved that email marketing is perfect for driving retention and the following reasons support that. They are: 1. Welcome emails, Cart Recovery emails, Loyalty emails and post purchase emails. Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/email-marketing/drive-customer-retention-email-marketing-01779908#mkYEibx0bsjCD70R.97

Customer retention is the most important thing for any organization. It is found that increasing customer retention by just 5% could result in profits that are between 25% and 95% higher, depending on the industry. Loyalty programs make customers happy. But, many organizations cannot integrate CRM with loyalty programs. To know more about the benefits of brand loyalty, read: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/insidecrm/customer-retention-whats-loyalty-got-to-do-with-it-74689

Predictive marketing uses machine learning to deliver more accurate insights to encourage sales. The primary objectives are measuring customer behavior and audience insights, campaign effectiveness, calculating and improving customer lifetime value and customer retention. Predictive analysis can achieve these goals by learning from patterns within the data that are derived from customer touch points. Read more at: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Using-Data-Predictive-Analytics-Helps-B2Bs-Throughout-Funnel/1013868

The customer support (CS) department is an important department as it helps in customer retention and customer satisfaction. According to a research, it was found that 78% of customers indicate competent CS agents are the key in keeping their satisfaction levels high. Contact center software plays a crucial role. If the software is updated if one wants to invest in a positive customer experience and increase employee engagement. Read more at: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/voip-news/your-customer-support-department-would-kill-for-these-contact-center-features-70686

Lack of knowledge sharing and transparency are the challenges faced by organizations nowadays. It was found in a research that 86% of the employees and managers blame workplace failures on a lack of collaboration, and 97% believe that information flow within a team directly affects project outcomes. Here ERP solutions come to the rescue. It is critical for small & medium sized business. ERP solutions helps in lowering and improving customer retention. Organizations can benefit from the implementation of the right ERP which include improved collaboration, transparency, employee satisfaction, and team outcomes. To know about key ERP benefits, follow:  : http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/inside-erp/simplify-employee-collaboration-in-smbs-with-erp-69798

A recent survey on customer retention revealed that insures lose as much as 20% of their customers each year. For the insurance agency this corresponds to approximately £500,000 to £1 million in lost premiums for every 1,000 policies. Customer retention is thus an important issue facing the industry. Three key points can help insurance companies to eliminate customer churn.
• Firstly, they need to properly understand their customer, which means determining overall market segmentation to understand cross sell and up sell opportunities at individual policyholder level.
• Secondly, insurance companies must be able to provide tailor made policies for each individual and also have a unique selling point in comparison to their rivals.
• Lastly, companies need to realize that they have to listen to their customer’s preferences rather than the customer having to choose from the list of policies the insurer has to offer.
Should the above be kept in mind in a company’s planning and operations customer churn can certainly be minimized if not completely eliminated.

For more information visit:
http://blogs.sap.com/banking/2015/06/19/preventing-customer-churn-with-better-data-analytics/

Mobile Apps have been at the center of customer based marketing. With the sea of options to choose from, retention of customer is not only about the attractive feature but also about the user experience it creates. Bryn Adler, content marketing manager at Localytics, has a piece of advice, which will help grow your app experience and reduce churn. Here are 7 points to keep in mind:

• No misleading Ads

• Lead with value

• User experience is paramount 

• Use data to track usage, retention and engagement

• Targeted marketing is smarter marketing 

• Feedback is the holy text

• Predicting churn 

For more on this click the link http://www.business2community.com/mobile-apps/making-customers-happy-in-the-age-of-options-reduce-churn-retain-app-users-01271973

A recent survey on customer retention revealed that insures lose as much as 20% of their customers each year. For the insurance agency this corresponds to approximately £500,000 to £1 million in lost premiums for every 1,000 policies. Customer retention is thus an important issue facing the industry. Three key points can help insurance companies to eliminate customer churn.
• Firstly, they need to properly understand their customers, which mean determining overall market segmentation to understand cross sell and up sell opportunities at individual policyholder level.
• Secondly, insurance companies must be able to provide tailor made policies for each individual and also have a unique selling point in comparison to their rivals.
• Lastly, companies need to realize that they have to listen to their customer’s preferences rather than the customer having to choose from the list of policies the insurer has to offer.
Should the above be kept in mind in a company’s planning and operations customer churn can certainly be minimized if not completely eliminated.

For more information visit:
http://blogs.sap.com/banking/2015/06/19/preventing-customer-churn-with-better-data-analytics/

A loyalty program is less about points and rewards and while these perks might attract consumers, they don’t suggest a sense of loyalty. In this age of data, the focus of these programs should be collection of useful data to help maintain good relations which benefit both consumers and the brand. However a business that trusts consumer-provided data is a business making decisions based on what is untrustworthy, random information. From observation of customer activities and external data sources, advanced analytics can create a profile of the customer for precise segmentation of the customer base. Business analysts and data scientists agree that expanding the data for any given model will typically produce dramatic improvements in analysis. That’s why many organizations have turned to a Big Data solution. Read more at: http://www.smartdatacollective.com/davemendle/323701/redefining-loyalty-programs-big-data-hadoop

Predictive Analytics is making its entry into the toolbox of small companies. Predictive Analysis is a three-part formula- analysis of past performance of situation under consideration, understanding the present and applying the past to present to predict the future. For small businesses, it can be applied for customer retention, target marketing, demand forecasting, and overall marketing. However, it is crucial to ascertain the purpose for using Predictive Analysis, as the technology may not necessarily be right for every company or for every situation in the small business sector. Read more at: http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/News/Marketing/can-predictive-analytics-help-your-small-business.html

Maximizing ROI has become the ultimate goal for Marketers. Increasing visibility, likes, followers and tweets seems to be the major indicators. Daniel Newman, author of The Millennial CEO and a Forbes contributor, in an article in Forbes term these indicators as vanity metrics which distract marketers from the actual story. Rather than measuring likes, focus should be on how many of the likes were converted into new customer and other measures which go beyond customer acquisition and sales that will help discern their real growth story. 

He lists out 7 things that marketers should measure: 

• Top of funnel conversions

• Engagement

• Customer satisfaction

• Customer Retention 

• Employee satisfaction 

• Employee retention 

• Attributable Revenue

For more on this, follow the link http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2015/05/12/7-things-marketers-should-measure-big-data-can-help/

Customer retention is the hardest part when maintaining quality leads. But, with the help of CRM, it is easy to make sure that one is following a process that will boost business. CRM system helps to create more productive campaigns and by monitoring response rates helps to build a successful business. Read more at: http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/digital-marketing-lead-generation/can-crm-be-your-new-lead-retention-tool/1621

Customer loyalty is very important for any organization. Organizations must focus on how to build customer relationship and create customer loyalty. Chris X. Moloney (Director of Market Development and Strategy for Maritz Loyalty Marketing) writes about some tips on how to build customer loyalty and improve customer retention. They are: 1. Forget Price, Quality and Service Levels. 2. Satisfaction does not equal Loyalty. 3. Know your Best Customers. 4.  Treat Different Customers Differently.5. Understand and Use Marketing ROI. To know more details about these tips, follow: http://www.customerfocusconsult.com/articles/articles_template.asp?ID=19#.VB-mgZSSyJI

In today's era of competitive world, it is less expensive to provide "great" service over "good service". The customer service company relies upon listening, analyzing and acting on it. Many organizations underestimate the impact and damage of various customer issues. This usually occurs because they are using data only from a single customer channel or taking into account their vocal customers only, limiting data to a single customer channel. If your organization works in silos, you may not have the complete picture especially if customers complain across multiple channels. This means if a company only counts the cases that complain on a specific channel, your view is limited to a small subset. Even if your organization counts all the complaints across all channels on a specific issue, it is likely that you'll still see a small percentage of the cases where customers are encountering these issues, because   majority of customers affected don't complain to the organization directly. In order to estimate more accurately and prioritize the impact of each customer concern organizations follows the following process. To know more:

http://www.informationweek.in/informationweek/news-analysis/271903/steps-measure-impact-silent-customers/

You may think that a call center business is pretty simple. But, as customers are changing their interaction behaviors, modernization of call centers is an imperative point of today’s business. Customer retention is an important parameter here and you must aim to reduce it to as minimum as possible because a slight reduction in it can benefit you by reducing your cost to a considerable extent. While looking at your call center business, you must aim for its effectiveness and must ensure that it is productive. But, the question is how should you go for it?

Mary Velan, author at Business 2 Community gives you some tips to revamp your call center customer experience from scratch. Read them here: http://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/4-tips-modernize-call-center-customer-experience-start-finish-0840687#!DylE3 .