Customer retention checklist

This customer retention checklist is designed for company owners and managers to give them a set of customer
retention tips, which, if realized, can ensure weighty growth of sales through realizing hidden potential of retained
customers, making good relations with them, winning their loyalty, along with decreasing the overall number of
customer defections.

Customer retention checklist:

 Establish evaluation of customer defections.
You need to keep customer retention statistics to be sure that you have customer defections and to be able to evaluate
the scale of this problem. You may assign one of your specialists to do this job. Ideally you may create particular
customer retention department.
 Range customer defections and define how you will register them.
Defections examples: customer missed an appointment, not re-purchased your product, not returning for additional
services and products etc. Let your customer retention manager to contact such clients to clarify their backgrounds.
 On basis of obtained information start making your customer retention plan.
Which kind of defections is the most “popular” in your case? Remember that your customer retention policy should be
focused on area which hides the most of unrealized profits.
 Define your target (most profitable) clients to focus customer retention activities on them.
When trying to increase your customer retention rate, remember that you do not need to obtain long term loyalty of
each client, but you need to retain clients with the biggest potential for consistent and lavish spending.
 Establish customer retention metrics to calculate how much you spend per customer.
Remember that customer retention is the same as making investments. You shouldn’t just increase customer retention
costs, but rather to direct resources to customers that potentially can bring highest returns.
 Make sure that you are ready to enable all possible communication channels for retention.
Ideally, you need to support your customer retention activities with all possible means, like reminder calls, sending
appointment cards and announcements, publishing insider newsletter, sending e-mail reminders and/or mail thank-you
notes (customer retention letters) etc.
 Establish membership cards and membership programs.
This is one of the basic points in any customer retention programs, because all of us are fond of feeling special, and to
be recognized as members of a club.
 Take care of welcome and thank you communications.
 Ensure satisfaction surveys, followed up by phone calls, letters or emails.
 Make sure you have qualified customer service, empowered to solve problems.
The critical part of customer retention process is how customers are treated by your customer service. Treat customers
like they are the most important persons on the earth, don’t let them have any bad experience! Provide customer
retention training to your personnel.
 Organize good technical support and advice.
Everything said in previous point is also fair for this one. Make sure that all technical aspects of your business are
properly organized; support clients with follow up satisfaction calls. Remember that your goal is not only to sell your
products, but to ensure their proper use – in spite of successful sales and good product qualities, yet a lot of customer
defections happen due to misunderstandings in technical questions.
 Design frequent buyer programs which stimulate your customers to get back to you again and again.
If it is possible, design system of increasing discounts for those who buy regularly. This is one of the most effective
customer retention methods. For example volume discounts – the more client buys, the more he saves.
 Ensure event driven communications that are connected to the customers’ lives.
Organize regular birthday and holiday greetings, presents and souvenirs for loyal clients.
 Establish database for keeping track on customers’ history.
Accurately track every customer’s purchases, preferences, complements and complaints, which are used to carry out
daily building of individual customer retention model. Today, you can use special computer-based customer retention
solutions for this purpose.
 Establish deep integration and coordination between marketing programs, advertising, direct communications,
customer service, and sales programs.
Customer retention importance should be communicated to everyone in your company, so all of the staff members can
be engaged into undertaking customer retention strategies.
 Take care of segmentation of the customer base by lifetime value groups.
Design and apply different marketing programs designed for each segment.
 Keep track on customer defections through customer retention formula.
Retention rate is normally calculated as the number of customers who have been lost over a period of time, usually
calculated over a quarterly or annual period. Regularly build customer retention diagrams for each period to compare
and evaluate your progress.