Companies spend over $1 Billion every year to retain the customers they have acquired.  A few companies understand the key logical and emotional drivers of customer loss or measure the impact of their efforts beyond basic VoC statistical analysis or “rescue program” calculations. 

Our customer journey research efforts with global brands covers four key aspects of the “Path to Purchase”:

1. Marketing / Prospect Leakage – Turning unaware prospects into buyers and minimizing the “leakage” of prospects from the “Awareness-to-purchase” stage
2. Sales / Revenue Leakage – Ensuring that customers can spend the full amount of their purchase intention during the sales & renewal journey, and that “Revenue leakage” throughout the customer lifecycle is minimized
3. Customer Retention / Customer Leakage – Ensuring that customers receive the positive experience that will keep them coming back year after year and renewing their purchases with the company and brand. Especially important in B2B contractual customer relationships.
4. Customer Satisfaction / Loyalty Leakage – Ensuring that customers receive the “on-brand” experience that results in high satisfaction/NPS scores that drives and sustains positive word-of-mouth” marketing.

This is Part 3 of a 4 Part series on this topic to fully explore the richness of this critical topic. 

Customer Retention / Customer Leakage

Our customer journey research for existing customers is designed to answer these questions:

• If 100 new customers start and receive the “on-brand” experience, how many will remain in 1, 2, 3 and 4 years later? What if they receive an “off-brand” experience?
• What can be done to improve the customer’s experience, the impact on loyalty and on business results? What improvements have the highest impact on customer retention?

A B2B manufacturing company worked with us to understand the foundational factors that would result in higher sales during a customer’s lifetime as they invested in a new customer acquisition strategy.  They assessed through customer dialogue and surveys over 10 factors about the product and service experience delivered and analyzed both the data but linked it to customer retention data over 8 years.  Factors included product quality, technical support, value-added sales advice, competitive pricing, on-time deliveries. 

The insights that emerged included:

• Quality & Service factors were far more important than price for both initial purchase and repeat purchases.
• Customers who felt they had received a “Signature Experience” (value-added advice, responsive service and on-time, on-spec shipments) had strong NPS scores and retention rates.
• Conversely, customers who hadn’t received the same “Signature Experience” had NPS scores 20 points lower and retention rates (after 3 years) of 30 points lower.
• The impact on customer lifecycle profitability was 3X when a “Signature Experience” was delivered.

As a result, they formalized their “Signature Experience” program and used it to accelerate their growth in both newly acquired customers (better conversion rate and initial purchase amounts) as well as existing customers (cross-selling other products and improved customer retention). 

Call 1-800-549-7170 or send an email to nitin@goldresearchinc.com  for a free consultation on this topic.

Gold Research is an award-winning Customer Journey Management firm with extensive experience in B2C and B2B journey mapping, path-to-purchase research with a special focus in deploying “real-time” and behavioral/neuroscience research formats to gather in-the-moment customer insights.