Proactive Customer Engagement for Renewals
It’s no surprise that any business that wants to expand and reach its growth goals needs new customers. But more important than getting new customers is retaining the existing ones using an effective customer retention management system. That’s where proactive customer engagement for renewals comes in. It involves reaching out to your customers and addressing any problems or needs even before they contact you or know a problem exists.
Giving this kind of attention throughout a customer’s journey shows you care about their success. In turn, it increases customer retention and the likelihood of more subscription renewals, leading to a higher return on investment (ROI).
Proactive customer engagement is a customer retention management strategy that saves on cost. In fact, according to research, it’s 25 times more expensive to get new customers than to keep current ones.
Here’s how to proactively engage your customers, get more renewals, and increase your net revenue retention.
How to Proactively Engage Customers for Renewals
Engaging customers for renewals is a customer retention management method that requires you to thoroughly monitor and understand your customers. It enables you to anticipate their needs early enough and offer them tailored solutions in the following ways:
Monitor Customer Accounts and Determine What’s At Risk
Customer retention starts with monitoring accounts and determining what’s at risk throughout their journey. It’s part of the customer renewal management process that lets your team understand what’s at risk and take the right action at the right time to help grow your net revenue retention. The risks can be low, medium, or high which will determine the action you take. For example, a high risk may require you to reach out to an executive in an organization, while a low risk may require a product demo for staff members. Some of the leading risk indicators that can affect retention and renewal management in your customer include:
- A higher number of support requests.
- Drop in the use of main features of your product.
- Negative feedback from your customers.
- Users not going through training or onboarding process.
- Change in the executive or sponsor of the product.
Leverage Customer Data to Offer Data-Driven Solutions
Customer retention strategies that use data-driven solutions are more accurate and reliable. They can help you leverage customer success and grow your revenue. For example, you can analyze customer data and decide what to upsell or cross-sell. The data enables you to understand a customer’s usage patterns, needs, and pain points. With the insights you get, you can send them personalized renewal suggestions addressing customer needs and helping them see how your product adds more value to their business.
Offer Tailored Customer Support and Continuous Communication
Successful customer renewal management heavily depends on the quality of customer support and communication. These retention strategies increase customer loyalty and their likelihood of renewing subscriptions.
Technical support should be readily available for customers who want to quickly ask a question or need a fast solution to a pressing problem. While at it, you can also, proactively offer other related solutions to the same questions. Furthermore, it’s best to ensure you’re in constant communication with your customers to identify such issues.
Communication gets easier when you automate tasks and workflow to ensure you’re always connected to your customers. For example, you can automate sending newsletters or updates of new product features that are relevant to specific customers. It shows you understand and care about their needs. Also, you can get feedback from customers through surveys or follow-up calls so that you understand their ever-changing needs.
Encourage Early Renewals With Incentives
Just like other retention strategies, you can incentivize subscription renewal. For example, you can give discounts, video tutorials, or additional features to any customer who renews their subscription on time. Such incentives can quickly increase the number of subscriptions and encourage customer loyalty.
It also strengthens the relationship you have with your customers and gives you a competitive advantage. A strong relationship increases trust, and more customers will prefer subscribing for the long term. It not only attracts new customers but also encourages the current ones to keep using your product. It is a customer retention method that increases your net revenue retention and expands your business.
Create a Standard Process and Define Roles for Customer Care Teams
A standardized process is a sure way of taking proactive customer engagement to the next level. The standard you create for your team includes having a defined role for customer care teams and product teams. Although these teams will work together to offer an excellent customer experience they need to understand their roles and not interchange them.
For example, clearly distinguish the communication roles of the customer service team and the product support team so they don’t accidentally start the same communication in two different forums.
Each team member should know when to start and stop communication. They should also know when to hand over an issue to the other team members.
Retain offers a Productive, Predictive, and Powerful way to Run Retention
Retain enables you to grow customer accounts across their lifecycle, automate tasks and renew operations that improve net revenue retention. It’s a tool that enables you to act on risks before they become a big problem and effectively boost your communication with your customers. You’ll be able to detect risks, map contracts and offer automatic interventions that save time and improve renewal management.