How to Prevent Customer Flight in Your Online Business?
Customers are the ones who support the company, since they buy the products or services it offers, in addition to being able to recommend the brand and attract new buyers. This is why companies must strive to retain their customers, making them continue buying their products.
Although this is more or less important depending on the sector and what each company offers, attention must be paid to customer flight and understanding how it occurs, its causes, and how it can be prevented.
What is customer churn?
Customer flight consists of the abandonment of a customer to a company, that is, stop buying its products or services. This can be due to various reasons and is a problem for companies since it directly affects their income and they must assume the cost of looking for new customers.
Therefore, it is a metric that companies should monitor and should try to keep low, especially when the customer is large or the cost of acquiring a new customer is high.
How can it be measured?
Customer churn is usually measured as a ratio, which is calculated over a given time and is often called customer churn.
Customer churn = (number of customers lost / total number of customers at the moment) * 100
For example, if a company has 100 customers and loses 15, its churn rate will be 15%. With this, companies know the proportion of customers they lose in a period, information that will be useful for the company’s decision-making, and evaluate metrics within the company’s marketing and finances.
Causes and consequences of customer flight
Customer flight can be generated for different reasons and companies must understand them, Let’s look at some of them:
- Bad customer service: Something key for companies is to serve customers well. If they have a problem with the product or service and can’t find a solution, likely, they likely won’t buy it again. Similarly, if the product is good, but the service is not, it is likely that the person will not buy again. For example, a website where the person buys a good product, but if the website does not work well, the person will surely not want to buy again.
- Bad user experience or bad product: Customers expect quality products or that they are worth what they are paying for. If the product that the person receives does not meet their expectations, they will surely not buy again. For this reason, companies must take care of the quality of their product or service, so that people want to buy again.
- Price and competitiveness: Having a high price or offering a product or service that is not on par with the competition can cause people to stop buying the product. Therefore, companies must monitor the price of competitors and offer something additional to differentiate themselves.
Losing customers brings with it several consequences for companies, among the most important we have:
- Lower income: Having fewer clients implies having a lower income, which makes it difficult for the company to sustain itself in the long term, especially if it is not capable of attracting new clients.
- Bad reviews: A customer may leave because they are dissatisfied with what the company offers and they may give a bad review or bad recommendation to other people. This makes fewer people want to be customers of the company and can make it difficult to acquire customers, making it difficult for the company to grow.
- Deterioration in metrics such as LTV or CAC: LTV (lifetime value) and CAC (customer acquisition cost) are important metrics. The LTV refers to the profit that the company obtains for each customer and the CAC is the cost of acquiring the same. If customers leave the company, the LTV falls and the CAC can increase if the company must increase its efforts to attract more buyers.
How to prevent customer flight?
Given the effects that this phenomenon can have on companies, it is important to understand how to prevent it and have some keys to retaining customers. Therefore, we will see below how this can be achieved.
Understand customers’ reasons
If the company has a somewhat high customer turnover rate and you want to lower it, one of the first steps is to understand the reasons why they stop buying. To do this, it is advisable to talk to customers who are leaving to understand their reasons, either through a questionnaire or other means.
Another way to do it can be by analyzing with people outside the company so that they can evaluate what the company offers, and customer objections and try to detect reasons for customer flight.
The objective is for the company to take the necessary corrective actions to prevent customer flight.
Offer incentives to your customers
In such a competitive environment, companies must be resourceful to keep their customers with them, this includes the need to offer them incentives to continue purchasing the product or service.
Among the incentives, you can have a loyalty program, discounts by purchase number, specialized attention, and much more. This will allow people to have greater incentives to continue being customers of the company and to buy more from them.
For example, you can offer special discounts for customers who have made more than 10 purchases or when they reach purchase number 5. This way, they will have incentives to continue purchasing the company’s products. Furthermore, in online businesses, it is a little simpler, especially due to having better information about buyers.
To stay ahead of the competition, it is essential to differentiate yourself.
Products are being updated and becoming more and more complete within the market, which is why companies must monitor their competition and offer more so that people continue to prefer their products over others.
Not only should they offer a competitive price, but they should also be able to offer good customer service and maintain a close relationship with them (where possible). This is something that can make an important difference, while they can choose to improve the user experience, such as a website that is easy to understand, intuitive, and offers various functionalities, so that it is pleasant for customers to make purchases.
To remain competitive in price you must be very efficient in managing the company and costs, to do this you can use the best ERP programs, which allow you to manage the company’s resources and are very useful at the managerial level. These help in decision-making, help automate tasks, reduce costs, and much more.
Personalize customer service
Customer service is another factor that can help companies differentiate themselves and avoid customer flight, since by being well served and receiving personalized treatment, they will feel comfortable with the company and will be less likely to leave. In turn, they will have a greater intention to recommend the company and its products to other people.
For example, companies can make use of CRM, programs specialized in customer relationship management, so that they can offer better customer service. This can be used to offer special offers to the customer if they have any preferences, and so on.
The idea of offering personalized treatment is that the client feels comfortable and well cared for. Although it is easier for some companies than for others, for example, for a company that offers financial services it is easier to personalize service than for one that offers products in wholesale chains; they must make an effort to achieve differentiation in customer treatment.
Learn from reviews and monitor customer satisfaction
One of the best ways to understand customer flight is through customer reviews, since this is where the reasons for dissatisfaction are found and measures can be taken to correct them.
These criticisms can come from reviews of the products or services, as well as monitoring customer satisfaction with surveys so that customers can say what they like, what they don’t like, and what could be improved.
Listening to user criticism will be of great benefit to companies, since it is something that people value and encourages them to continue buying, also reducing customer flight.
