The key to Customer Retention and Increased Upselling – B2B and B2C

Relationship between customers and businesses starts and ends with Reachability. Once the sale is made, the next obvious challenge is to retain the customer and maximize the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) – for the subscription length, the reputation, the potential likelihood of upselling, for the reviews, etc.

Businesses need to take care of that customer (well, Duh…), and being a part of a relationship he or she has with the business means that first and foremost the business needs to be accessible and reachable. This makes excellent business sense for various reasons of course, yet it’s not the “business” that needs to be reachable and accessible, it’s the people – sales, support, customer care etc. – who need to be reachable and accessible.

Accepting that retaining a customer is roughly 10%-20% of the acquisition cost of a new customer dictates that keeping customers happy is an integral part of protecting the customer base and the brand reputation of the business. It takes years to build a strong brand, but only minutes to destroy it. Especially at a time where the relationship between brand and customer is mainly virtual/online/over cell phones, having a good relationship with customers has become even more important, and more challenging.

In addition, it is a lot easier to sell new products or services to existing customers. Upselling not only saves substantial time and effort in the sales cycle but also shows that you care about your customers. Just think about it – for example, sales/support/customer care reps know the pain points of your customers. They already bought a product or service from your business that solved a major problem they had. Once that product or service has a new cool feature or functionality that will make their life even easier, they will be quick to order it from you, their trusted provider/business.

Overall, selling to an existing customer is also only around 10%-20 of the cost it takes to onboard a new one, since no lead generation and prospecting is needed. If you have a good relationship with your customer, it will take less effort to convince him or her (addressing objections) that the new feature or product is really cool and worthwhile investing in. In other words, since the customer already bought from you before, that customer trusts you, your company, and its products and services.

However, there is one major caveat – you need your employees to be available to your customers, accessible and reachable. They are not going to waste time chasing them to find out more, ask for details, or request a free demo or trial. They easily get upset if they cannot reach their sales rep, since this is perceived at not caring. It only takes a few missed calls for them to lose trust in your company and turn to competitors never to return.  To put it in simple words – losing touch equals losing trust equals losing the customer. To illustrate, let’s have a look at the following two scenarios.

Scenario 1

You work for an insurance company and sell building insurance, car insurance, and health care insurance to a fast-growing startup. The purchasing manager tries to contact you to know if the current insurance policies also cover corona-related issues and what additional insurances or premium payments might be needed to cover all employees and contingencies. She calls you at work, but the switchboard tells her that you are now working from home. She sends you an email telling you that she will call you on your cellphone that you use privately and for work. You miss the call since you are on the phone with your healthcare provider to set up an appointment for your mother to get vaccinated against COVID-19. You hear that someone is trying to call you, but since you do not know if it’s private or not, you decide to call whoever it is back at a later time. Obviously the call isn’t registered in the CRM and eventually you do not remember to return the call. The purchasing manager gets upset since you could not be reached at work and did not answer after she called your mobile. She concludes that you obviously don’t care enough or simply unresponsive, and decides to check out other insurance companies where the insurance agent is far more approachable. You lost this customer, quite likely forever.

Scenario 2

A customer bought a top-notch treadmill of $3,000 to keep fit during the COVID19 lockdown. That customer discussed with the sales rep his plans to create a fitness room at home with more equipment. The sales rep advised him what kind of equipment to add, such as a press bench, weights, a stationary bike, and a rowing machine. Once the first purchase, the treadmill, was delivered and set up, it did not work properly after only one week. Understandably upset, the customer tries to contact his sales rep to ask what to do about it. However, the sales rep is on a long personal call so he’s unavailable, and here as well – does not recognize the number and to add to the confusion the call isn’t logged in the CRM so there’s no record of it anywhere. The customer cannot get hold for the sales rep even after contacting the helpdesk, and sadly  decides that the sports company is unreliable, returns the treadmill, and cancels the planned orders for the other fitness equipment. The frustrated customer also voices his opinion on several online fitness forums.

In both scenarios, we see that it does not take much to lose a customer and kill any chance of upselling. Especially in a contactless environment, a sales rep must act like the customer’s best buddy – being available and reachable to show he cares. This requires that cell phones are used for both private and business calls. This can be problematic. The best way to solve this, is using a solution such as the one of Mobile2CRM, which enables having multiple cellular profiles on one cellphone – a profile and number for business purposes and a private one. That eliminates the need for separate devices or SIM cards to separate private from business calls; just one elegant solution to keep your customers close to you – and always available to them, without compromising on privacy of your personal number. Your business profile ensures that all your business communications (calls, text massages, chats, etc.) are strictly separated from your private communications, respecting your privacy.

Best of all, your business communications on your mobile device will be captured automatically and logged into your company’s CRM. That logged information is always up to date since the logging is done in real-time when you are making or receiving a business call or sending or receiving a business-related text message. Having such a cellular-grade solution on their cell phones, it would have enabled the insurance agent in scenario 1 to immediately respond to the purchasing manager and the sales rep in scenario 2 to do the same regarding his fitness equipment customer. The solution even allows for adding notes and comments to the already existing call log and recording, which makes follow-up (like sending a technician to the treadmill customer) easy. It’s the ultimate way to keep being close to your customers and give them the support and care they need and deserve.

Just to emphasize, your business and private profiles use the SIM number on the same device, but only calls and text messages performed to/from the business profiles are logged in the CRM. This means that your company will be able to review and analyze the content of your business calls, but not that of your private conversations. So you can keep on using your private device, being sure that there is a complete separation between your personal and business activities. This makes switching between sending a private text message to your mother and answering a business call from a distraught customer a breeze.

Ilan Paretsky

Ilan Paretsky

CMO Mobile2CRM

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