With an innate ability to survive in any kind of macroeconomic, regulatory, or competitive environment, cockroach startups set themselves apart from many in the startup ecosystem. With 2023 being the year of cockroach startups and viability being the buzzword, it would be imperative for such startups to focus on customer retention strategies.
Until now, a common trend that has been seen is that most cockroach startups focus excessively on acquiring customers. Going ahead, it would be crucial to understand the importance of retaining customers, which has proven to be a real gamechanger for many startups. Plus, retaining customers is always less expensive than acquiring new ones.
When trying to create an initial wave of customers, it is normal to spend on advertising and marketing. However, once this task is done, the next code for cockroach startups should be to optimise their customer retention score.
To retain customers, we often see startups splurging on perks and discounts for their loyal base of customers. While this helps retain customers for the short term, cockroach startups should look at creating meaningful long-term strategies to enable preference and drive behavioural changes among existing customers, thereby leading to sustainable retention.
Now, let’s explore how cockroach startups can achieve this:
Self-Servicing Tools For The DIY Lot
Empowered customers in 2023 and beyond may feel the need to service their own problems, especially when the solutions aren’t overly technical. Startups should provide self-service tools to their customers, which could include the following:
- Knowledge bases or FAQ pages
- Comprehensive tutorials for your products and services
- Troubleshooting manuals
Hyper-Personalised CX For An Experiential Journey
With a steady supply of competitors at a given point, it is often difficult for startups to stand out. Personalised customer service, which is often possible with CRM software or similar tools, allows your customer service teams to:
- Make every customer experience memorable
- Assist individual customers as much as possible
- Maintain detailed records of individual customer interactions
- Solve problems thoroughly and efficiently
Investments In Technology To Spur Customer Retention Rate
Chatbots are critical to customer retention because they can prevent customers from clicking away if one of your customer service representatives is busy, or dealing with another inquiry. This is a major concern for many startups, which may lack a large employee base to handle complaints around the clock. If a startup’s customer service team is small, chatbots can:
- Direct customers to the previously mentioned FAQ pages or knowledge bases
- Answer questions for site visitors directly, relieving some of the burdens from your customer service staff
- Recognise/find a pattern in consumer complaints, so that your customer service representatives are better prepared to handle them when they become available
Create A Feedback Mechanism
In their quest to retain customers, cockroach startups must establish a process to gather customer feedback and share it with everyone in the organisation. A feedback loop with customers offers a system for gathering, analysing, and disseminating customer feedback and surveys. To establish a feedback system that will ultimately impact CX, startups can:
- Create a provision to receive feedback after each interaction
- Analyse results by observing trends or patterns
- Distribute product reviews to enhance the design
Customer retention should be one of the top priorities for cockroach startups. The higher your customer retention rate, the more profits you can expect to make in the long run. This also guarantees a faster scale-up.
Getting people to try your product or service is easy, but making them your evangelists is tricky. Therefore, it is crucial to create customer retention strategies focusing on the overall customer experience.
Finally, in 2023 and beyond, customer retention practices could shield cockroach startups from increasing competition, and falling discretionary spending and demand.