Everything You Need to Know About Customer Lifecycle Management
Want to improve customer retention rates and provide better service? Learn how to manage the customer lifecycle to create a stronger customer experience.
Catch up on your prescribed dosage of customer service with this week's latest and greatest content on the Service Blog.
Enjoy,
Flori Needle
HubSpot Service Blog
Everything You Need to Know about Customer Lifecycle Management
Every good customer service professional knows that business is about more than closing a one-time deal. The best companies build mutually-beneficial relationships with customers that equate to a higher customer lifetime value — meaning, these customers are going to stick around for a while. Enter the customer lifecycle. Analyzing the customer lifecycle allows you to better prepare your marketing, sales, and customer service teams to turn one-time purchasers into loyal promoters. We'll walk you through the definition of a customer lifecycle, the process of conducting a customer lifecycle analysis, the best tools for managing it, and the top lifecycle marketing strategies that can increase your customer retention rates. Let's get started.
Want me to let you in on a customer service secret? When a rep tells you they'll look into your case and get back to you, most aren't rushing over to an expert to solve your problem. Rather, they're probably taking another customer's phone call. Don't take it personally though, there's a method to this madness. The rep is probably using an automated ticketing system. So, while the rep is listening to the next customer's problem, they're simultaneously pinging a specialist to take a look at your case. Then, when the specialist has a solution, the rep can relay that information to the customer via their original ticket. As your company continues to grow and expand its customer base, your help desk may be ready to adopt a ticketing system (keep in mind that some help desk solutions, like HubSpot, come with ticketing included). Ticketing systems help customer service teams better prioritize their assignments so they can create more enjoyable customer experiences.
Imagine this. You work for a social media company where users regularly update their "status" and post pictures and videos of their favorite moments. Since the big social media boom of the early 2010s, the company has capitalized on people's readiness to share information. Where did you go to college? Where do you work? What's your relationship status? There are tons of information social media users put out to the public; however, some of the data these platforms store is private. Instead, the company experiences a data breach that exposes the information of more than 540 million users. Facebook dealt with this crisis in April 2019, but they are not the only company dealing with data breaches. Capital One, the financial organization, reported a data breach in July 2019 where a hacker gained access to tens of thousands of bank account numbers and Social Security numbers. Less detrimental but equally as interesting, Twitter saw a coordinated attack on their high-profile users where hackers managed to take over the accounts of Barack Obama, Jeff Bezos, Apple, Uber, and more. When you are on the outside looking in, this information appears as an interesting news piece. However, for those involved, these situations can feel like a crisis. And they are treated as such. In response, companies mobilize their team to handle crisis management.
10 Customer Retention Metrics & How to Measure Them
What's the key ingredient for growing your B2B business without needing to acquire new customers? Customer retention. After all, the more revenue you generate from your existing customers, the less pressure you put on your customer acquisition efforts. In other words, you'll be less pressured to acquire new customers if your existing ones continue to buy. The challenge? Without customer retention data, you won't know if you're doing a good job retaining customers, you won't know if you're losing too many high-value accounts, etc. If you don't have this information and you don't know how to get it, you won't be able to make the business decisions you need to for your customer success strategy. Read on to learn how to measure customer retention, which metrics to track, how to calculate them, and why they're important.
A Beginner's Guide to Customer Feedback Management
The current business landscape dictates that companies must juggle insecure supply chains, multiple communication channels, and increasingly demanding and vocal customers to stay competitive. It's not enough to simply create an awesome product or service, businesses also need to prioritize the customer experience. Creating a personalized and responsive customer service environment is a stated priority for nearly 88% of companies. This makes sense, given that 96% of customers report they will stop doing business with a company after a bad customer experience. In order to reduce pain points and churn, and increase customer satisfaction and sales, companies need to find ways to improve the customer experience. This requires knowing your customers' sentiments, complaints, and insights so that you can identify areas for improvement and allocate the appropriate resources to enact positive change. To gather the information required to improve the customer experience, businesses must rely on customer feedback management (CFM). CFM enables companies to proactively gather data about customers' experiences, wants, and suggestions that can be used to streamline service delivery, improve products, and increase customer satisfaction. By adopting customer feedback software and best practices related to gathering and analyzing types of customer feedback, companies can position themselves to retain more customers and increase brand loyalty amongst their existing customer base.
Every week, we ask HubSpot's support team to answer questions about customer service. Have something you want to ask? Submit it below!
What are user experience surveys?
"User experience surveys are meant to help you improve your user/customer experience, so you can adjust your long-term product and customer service strategy."
