When a business’s decision-makers develop a customer retention strategy, they typically involve certain critical team members such as the marketing director, in these discussions.
These team members can certainly play an important role in identifying how a business can maintain a loyal customer base. However, CEOs and managers often forget that IT specialists can also help boost customer retention in several key ways.
The following are a few noteworthy examples:
Designing and Maintaining a Reliable Digital Product
This is an obvious point, but it’s so important that it earns a spot here. It’s becoming increasingly common for businesses across a range of industries to offer customers mobile apps or similar digital products. Sometimes an app is a business’s main product. Sometimes, a digital product merely augments its primary services.
Regardless, a business will have more success attracting and keeping customers if its digital product is user-friendly, functions reliably and offers a genuinely pleasant or rewarding experience. As such, even if a business isn’t necessarily built around an app or digital product, decision-makers should prioritize ensuring their IT team is equipped to address any issues that may negatively impact the impression an app makes on users.
Promoting New Approaches to Customer Service
IT specialists should be involved in discussions surrounding customer retention strategies in part because they have certain knowledge and expertise that other team members may lack.
For instance, it’s natural for marketing directors to be involved in these discussions because marketing directors tend to be up to date on the most effective ways to engage with new customers while maintaining brand loyalty among existing customers.
IT specialists should also participate in developing customer retention strategies because they’re typically familiar with innovations and emerging technologies that can improve customer service. Therefore, they can suggest ways businesses can leverage these technologies to solidify their relationships with customers.
For instance, because chatbots are now much more sophisticated than they were just a few years ago, businesses have begun using them to address basic customer service requests. Unlike a human customer service professional, a chatbot is available 24/7, ensuring a convenient experience for customers reaching out to a business with questions or concerns. An IT specialist could help a business establish a plan for taking advantage of such an innovation.
That’s merely one example. Essentially, by not including IT team members in customer retention strategy discussions, businesses are potentially missing out on valuable insights and contributions.
Expanding Analytics
A business’s relationship with a customer doesn’t end when the customer makes his or her first purchase. On the contrary, this typically marks the beginning of a relationship with a customer.
Predicting how relationships with new customers will develop over time can be difficult. That’s not to say it must be. Business owners and managers can analyze key data points to help them better understand how the average new customer’s relationship with their brand and overall organization changes over time. This can, in turn, help them identify and correct any weak spots.
This is another reason to include IT when improving customer retention plans. Depending on how robust an IT department is, IT specialists may be able to perform critical data analysis themselves, sharing their findings with all others involved in customer retention strategizing. If an IT department is smaller, team members can at least implement systems for efficiently organizing and analyzing relevant data.
All business owners should keep these points in mind when reaching out to team members to discuss customer retention. Too often, IT is left out of these discussions. These examples illustrate why that shouldn’t happen.
