Keep your customers (happy) during recession

Recession has come as a strong incentive for companies to  understand more than ever the importance of customer loyalty and word-of-mouth, and to create strategies to ensure they come out of this downturn with good results, profit even.

Especially in B2B, there are three main tools that you can use to make sure that your company survives the crises, and maybe even thrive afterwards:

• Retention. Attracting a new client costs much more than keeping the ones you already have happy. Furthermore, an old customer can bring new clients using word of mouth. Financially speaking, retention can lead to big returns. FedEx, for example, gained $100 million in revenues after a 1 percent improvement in customer retention.
• Repurchase. This is a strategic and profitable tool to keep your revenue base, and even increase it. The best way you can encourage repurchase is by providing your clients with a positive customer experience. Purchase habits will increase, thus leading to an increase in sales.
• Referral. Today, you can even measure the correlation between word-of-mouth referrals and financial outcomes through special programs or surveys. The financial benefits associated with word-of-mouth referrals can be impressive. The only "dark" side to this is that negative word of mouth can lead to significant losses in popularity and, implicitly, in sales.

More specifically, here are a few tips to help you set up a good retention program:

• Have one-on-one meetings with clients, just to discover their needs and worries
• Make the executive team's contact information available to all clients
• Include thoughtful gestures into all client-oriented activities, especially in face-to-face interaction

From a recession point of view, opportunities now arise to do all those small tasnks that you’ve been postponing because of lack of time. And customer loyalization is probably the most important task you have to complete these days, to make sure you overcome the downturn successfully.