Retaining Customers – What is Your Strategy?

You know how essential it is to gain new clients and make new business for your company, but how much emphasis should you put on pleasing existing clients? Some organizations fail to realize that satisfying your current client base is crucial. Retaining loyal clients is not an easy task, it requires innovative thinking to guarantee that clients keep doing business with you. It comes down to creating buying experiences that satisfy your clients’ purchase requirements. Do you understand the needs of your clients? This should be the first prerequisite in guaranteeing that they will return to you time and time again, but you need the right tools to do so. Investing in a powerful Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution can be the first step in keeping your existing clients happy while helping you anticipate their needs. You want to determine the proper goods and/or services to market and generate offers that will excite your buyers. With an ERP system, you will be given better information to enable you to make smarter, faster decisions that enhance interactions with your clients while boosting their satisfaction.

What are the top strategies you can utilize to help organizations like yours satisfy clients and entice them to keep buying your products?

1. Anticipate Client Needs: When a client routinely purchases your products, you should be able to identify patters in their purchasing behavior. From these patterns, you can determine how to enhance client satisfaction. You want to drive sales and prevent your clients from taking their business to one of your competitors. Investing in an ERP system can help you predict future requirements while providing insight into what your clients may want to purchase in the future.
2. Maximize Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Opportunities:  Do you have a strategy of selling higher-quality products or complementary products to your clients? Do your sales people promote upgraded versions of certain components that could ultimately improve your clients’ products? By presenting them with upgrades, the sales representative shows the client how committed the company is to their success.
3. Knowing Your Most Profitable Customers: Your most profitable clients may not simply be the ones who purchase the most from you. You need to analyze when purchases are made, the frequency of orders, and the revenue generated by those orders. Being able to do this allows you to segment clients according to value. After all, profitability is a relative term. For example, a certain customer may purchase a substantial amount from you but may also require a great deal of support and service that off-sets the revenue you generate from their purchases, whereas another client buys less but requires no additional service. Understanding profitability is the first step to cultivating relationships with your top clients.
4. Delivering Superior Service: Do you make and meet your promises for goods and services in a timely fashion? You need clear visibility throughout your supply chain to determine where you’re at in terms of inventory levels and your manufacturing capacity. ERP software that can help manage your inventory and supply chain so that you can more effectively produce and manage client orders, while successfully optimizing the order-to-delivery process.

If any of these strategies resonate with you, contact Third Wave and find out how you can be more proactive about retaining your current clients by adding our ERP software!