Like other industries, communication service providers would want to know the reason for these high churn rates so that they can work towards reducing the attrition rates. Additionally, sales, marketing, and other customer-facing executives can work towards improving retention rates and adopting new techniques to do so.
Communication service providers are actively looking for ways to spot customers who are likely to cancel. This helps them restructure their sales and marketing strategies to give the customer exactly what they are looking for.
How do you identify customers who are likely to cancel?
Communication companies must effectively work towards identifying the top reasons why a customer might cancel their subscription. While a dissatisfied customer would surely switch brands, there can be other reasons for them to cancel as well.
Repeated calls from customer support executives, higher-than-expected bills, repeated outages, and slow service can also be reasons for dissatisfaction. With that, poor customer experience and customer support can also cause customers to look for alternatives.
In some cases, customers might try out other competitor brands and switch to their services for a better digital experience.
So, the burning question now is: how do communication service companies ensure that their customers are satisfied?
Here are a few indicators you can keep in mind to help with that:
- Tenure: Customers who have been using your service for a long time are less likely to switch to another brand
- Lifetime Value: Customers with a longer tenure tend to make use of the benefits offered as loyalty points and are less likely to leave
- Good Customer Support: Faster problem resolution and self-service customer support increase the number of satisfied customers for a company
- Average call handling time: longer waiting times and call durations directly result in lower customer satisfaction
- Past data usage: If a customer has a history of using large amounts of data in the past couple of weeks or months, he is unlikely to make a switch
- Subscription churn: This often refers to the customers who unsubscribe to your offering or stop paying for it within a given period of time.
What must communication service providers (CSPs) do?
Today, most CSPs have an effective process in place that can measure the above metrics to provide better clarity. However, this is stored in different siloed systems, which makes it difficult for the customer support reps to compile it and find a single view.
For this, CSPs must embrace the power of technology to streamline processes. With technology, companies can now pull out data from different sources and aggregate it into one churn score. The higher the churn score, the higher are the chances that the customer will disassociate with the brand.
In fact, customer support reps can access this churn score to effectively adopt the right strategies that can help increase customer retention. They can get a single view of the customer’s digital behaviour and take further actions to prevent them from cancelling. With this, they can also personalise the customer’s digital experience and increase engagement.
With a 360-degree view of the customer, the reps can access the customer’s history with the company and improve on the lifetime value metric as well. Additionally, they can also view the reasons that might result in higher churn rates for individual customers and help them build personalised offerings accordingly. This can also help them increase customer loyalty metrics for the company, improving the ROI.
How can Salesforce become your helping hand?
Now that you know that technology can effectively help your CSP company grow, here are a few ways that Salesforce can help you build stronger and lasting relationships with customers to improve your ROI.
Effective data management
The Salesforce CRM brings all siloed customer data together in one place to help all your teams make use of it. For instance, your customer support executives can access this data to personalise engagement. Even your marketing teams can use this data to gauge customer demands and build better strategies to reach out to larger audiences. Furthermore, your sales teams can focus their efforts on the customers that have a higher conversion rate, improving your ROI. This uniformity of data ensures that vital customer information isn’t lost, regardless of all the internal changes that happen in your company.
Higher customer satisfaction
With in-depth information about the customer’s digital behaviour, your teams can build better strategies that can improve customer retention. The Salesforce platform gives you the power of AI to effectively personalise your team’s interactions with the customer, improving their engagement via different channels like social media, emails, and messaging. It also gives you access to customer data that can help you build offers, promotions, and other engagement techniques that reduce churn rates.
Easier follow-up and tracking
While dealing with a large number of customers and prospects, it can be very difficult for sales and customer support reps to keep track of all follow-ups. The data consolidation that Salesforce provides helps B2C companies effectively track the customer’s relationship with the organisation in real-time. It helps your teams filter out regular customers and recent acquisitions to improve their follow-up strategies by sending out automated messages. It also gives you the opportunity to gauge your customer’s satisfaction level via social media to help you improve your approach.
