The sole motive of any business entrepreneurship is to thrive at any cost & become a self-sustaining, profitable, and constantly developing organization. The foundation of any business venture solely depends on the acceptance of the customer/consumer towards the provided service/product. Every business upholds the loyalty and interest of its customers. Considering this fact, customer acquisition and retention turn out to be significant factors in expanding your business. Focusing on just one and neglecting the other might hamper the company’s growth. Understanding both these terminologies is essential to grasp how to improve them.
Customer acquisition signifies acquiring new customers or persuading people to buy the company’s service/product. Generally, a customer acquisition cost is involved in the process as customers are brought down through various marketing conduits, such as consciousness about the branding to purchase conclusions. On the other hand, customer retention refers to the dimension that calculates customer loyalty towards the company. Simply put, an organization can keep its customers over time, turning them into repeat buyers & averting them from switching to a competitor. Customer retention is cost-effective and provides positive word-of-mouth marketing from the customer’s side that can significantly increase revenue.
Various online and offline marketing strategies, tactics, and digital channels, mixed with cross-channel marketing campaigns like social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, search marketing, display marketing, etc., are often used to acquire and retain customers. For customer acquisition and retention to be effective, there is a need for the company to evolve with the changing preferences and behaviour of the customer. Cloud telephony services are one of the best tools and platforms when it comes to customer acquisition and customer retention. Cloud telephony solution complements the company with customer engagement features such as apprehending and tracking potential leads, tracking customer queries, analysing recorded calls, personalising IVRs for targeted customers and much more.
Let’s analyse some of the approaches of cloud telephony that assist in achieving customer acquisition and retention.
Instant Query Resolution :–
While purchasing a service/product, customers usually have a lot of queries regarding the service/ product. Significantly, when the product/service has a higher value, the customer’s minds raise uncertainty and doubts. In such intricate situations, rather than leaving the customer to decide, the company should provide them with instant query resolution and nudge them towards taking the right decisions. With features like click-to-call and missed-call services, customers can directly contact the call centres and get their questions answered instantaneously. Through click to call, the customer can click on a published number of the company, and it directs the call to an agent or the IVR. With the missed call services, the customer can give a missed call to the advertised number of the company and gets a call back at their preferred time. This leads to a loyal customer base and a better customer experience.
Customized Customer Experience :–
When the company starts to attend to every small need of its customers, the customers reward the company with positive responses and loyalty. Cloud telephony provides customised customer experiences by integrating with CRM platforms and utilising the database of new and existing customers to create an individualistic approach for every customer that calls the business representatives. The agents do not need to memorize every customer, their queries, their issues and the resolutions provided. Cloud telephony keeps track of all the instances that a particular customer has called earlier and pops up the information to the agent every time the customer calls next. The information also remains updated, and the customer need not inform his problems every time he/she calls.
Directing Calls Through Multi-Level IVR :–
Another way to offer customers instant or proper solutions is by directing calls through a multi-level interactive voice response system. A multi-level IVR holds multiple inputs from the caller to direct the call to the appropriate department. Most of the time, if the customer is looking for small queries like discounts, offers, sending specific information to their phone numbers through messages, or information regarding a new product/service launch, the multilevel IVR provides these resolutions instantaneously for which the customer need not wait for an agent or hang up the call. Eliminating the call wait time and call disconnections enhances the customer’s impression of the company and help in retention.
Induce Follow-Ups Regularly :–
Following up on the customer after a new customer chooses your service/product or an existing customer upgrades the product/service or adds new features/services to their prevailing purchase can boost the customer’s faith in the company. Once a potential lead becomes a customer, most companies do not keep an interest in learning whether their product/service is working correctly for the customer. This might encourage the customer to give negative feedback on the company. To ensure positive reactions and good word-of-mouth marketing, a regular follow-up with new & existing customers with the help of an outbound call centre is ideal.
Building the Trust Factor :–
Cloud telephony dynamically influence the marketing campaigns to run to attract more customers and retain the existing ones. Benefits such as more cost-effectiveness, more features, provisions for monitoring and analysing calls, etc provide the scalability and exceptional customer experience and support that need to build the trust factor for your brand.
