Boosting Customer Retention with Salesforce: Strategies for Success

Discover four ways to streamline costs and retain customers in the consumer goods industry.

By Greg Bistany

It’s no secret that companies across every industry are facing external challenges that are going to alter their long-term plans. The common theme during tough times is to focus on “saving” things — saving money, saving customers, and saving employees. As it pertains specifically to the consumer goods industry, companies are facing challenges impacting multiple parties, including suppliers, distributors, retail partners, and their end consumers.

Regardless of the strategy you or your organization has implemented, it is inevitable you’ll be making an investment of time and money to address these challenges. These investments usually fall into buckets of work focused on optimizing technologies or manual processes. The decision becomes difficult when you have to figure which technologies and which processes will have the most impact in the shortest period of time for fear of extensive ongoing costs without a positive return. Executives find themselves asking the questions:

• Where will our ROI be the greatest?
• Are we able to execute this work in-house?
• Technology consolidation or expansion of current platforms?
• Where are the risks?
• What does this do to our long-term strategy?
• How much investment will we need to make?

If these are tough questions to answer, involving a strategic partner to conduct a discovery engagement will help to expedite and clarify what makes sense for your organization based on their findings.

Here are four highlighted areas that are directly connected to customer retention as well as streamlining internal costs. This may require the implementation of a new Salesforce product on the expansion of your current Salesforce footprint. Picking an area to focus on and then getting started requires confidence in the ROI as well as ability to execute.

1. Personalized customer experiences

Focus area:

Sixty-five percent of business buyers say they’re likely to switch brands if their company is not treated like a unique organization. By providing personalized customer service, companies can build stronger relationships with their customers and increase loyalty. This could include assigning dedicated account managers, offering personalized recommendations based on previous purchases, and providing customized support.

Recommendation:

By using Salesforce Data Cloud in combination with Service Cloud and digital engagement, the opportunity to tailor customer experiences is more feasible. And by tying in your customers’ journey, you can pinpoint past attrition points in an effort to retain more customers.

2. Loyalty programs

Focus area:

Loyalty programs are a great way to reward customers for their business and incentivize them to continue purchasing from the company. These programs could include rewards points for purchases, exclusive discounts, and early access to new products or services. Leveraging loyalty program data to create meaningful, actionable segments is shown to have a 10-15% percent increase in long-term value and retention.

Recommendation:

The best loyalty programs are supported by a connected suite of technologies. Integrating the segmentation of loyalty members into marketing, sales, and service processes and tools makes a difference. With a unified loyalty program, your company has a value proposition that makes it very difficult to do business with anyone else.

3. Proactive customer outreach

Focus area:

Companies can proactively reach out to their customers to check in on their satisfaction and offer assistance. This could include follow-up calls or emails after a purchase, personalized communications. One of the most predominate use cases is around proactive customer service, which can have a direct positive impact on your customer effort scores. The only consideration, which is a common misconception, is proactive communications you equate to customer deflection, and in most cases a customer-generated communication results from a proactive message.

Recommendation:

By pairing the same customer journey maps, which have highlighted the key attrition points with tools like Pardot or Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, you can attempt to retain customers who may be about to attrite due to an issue they are experiencing. There is a lot of opportunity to leverage first- and third-party data to segment and proactively reach out to customers who are at risk of working with another company.

4. Customized product/service offerings

Focus area:

Companies can provide customized product or service offerings to meet the unique needs of their top customers. This could include personalized product recommendations based on previous purchases, customized service packages, and special pricing or discounts. Approximately 78% of customers are more likely to repeat purchases from companies that personalize.

Recommendation:

A combination of the digital footprints from customers matched with the taxonomy of products/services provides an incredible opportunity to personalize your customers’ experience. The following technologies heavily contribute to successfully creating personalized product offerings for customers:

• Salesforce Data Cloud
• Data analytics tools
• Machine learning tools
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud products
• Salesforce Einstein for commerce

A leading technology is only part of the equation, having an agile data strategy to continue to align products and product offerings to Customer interaction details is also a must.

If any of these strategies sound applicable to you and your organization, I’d love to meet you at Salesforce Connections in Chicago on June 7–8 to discuss more ways for how to boost customer retention, accelerate innovation, and maximize ROI.

Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.