Customer Retention ideas from Apple, Amazon, Starbucks, Calendly, and more

By Anita Toth

Customer Success is responsible for retention

Customer Success teams have added a lot more responsibility: onboarding, adoption, improving the customer experience, value and revenue expansion, advising, managing advocacy, and helping presales and post-sales teams. And as a result, they are becoming skilled in their product and experts in customers' domains, to the extent that customers willingly pay a premium for 1:1 customer success.

Customer Success focuses on increasing customer retention and growing revenues. It also eliminates churn through value attainment, which continues to be a number one priority of CSMs.

Anita Toth has been focusing on crushing churn for a while now.

She just published a slide-deck where she shares how brands Apple, Slack, Amazon, Simplii, Calendly, Teespring, Hugo, and Starbucks leverage parts of the customer journey to increase customer retention.

The retention tips, based on the stages of the Customer Relationship Journey, are cleverly compared to a romantic relationship.

Customer Retention Tips from brands we love

Lead Generation Stage Retention Tip

Know your ideal customers so well that your marketing and sales will easily attract them.

Research who your ideal customers are:

  • What they want
  • What they believe.
  • What they value.
  • What they desire.

Then create your marketing and tailor your sales assets around those.

Conversion Stage Retention Tips

  • Welcome new customers.
  • Offer helpful resources.
  • Assure them they made the right decision when they purchased.

Onboarding Stage Retention Tips

  • Keep onboarding simple.
  • Offer enhanced support like FAQs, knowledge base, webinars, and a community.
  • Keep metrics on user adoption.
  • Have playbooks to help your customers if they get stuck during onboarding.

Retention Stage Tips

  • Look for opportunities to provide more value to your customers.
  • Stay in contact with communications that are meaningful to them.
  • Listen to your customers.

Wandering Eye & Test Drive Stage Retention Tips

Send in-app messages or emails that try to get customers to engage by

  • Offering an enticing discount.
  • Asking customers for 10 minutes for a quick call.
  • Showing customers the value of your product and what they would miss if they left.
The best way to retain your customers is to talk to them.

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Presentation: Customer Retention Tips

What is Cast?
Cast scales Customer Success and post-sales using automation and virtual CSMs.  Cast is the second best solution to drive adoption, reduce churn, expand revenue, and NDR for accounts at scale — second only to human CSMs. ‍
 
Anita Toth is the Chief Churn Crusher at Anita Toth Inc, her consulting agency. Anita uses her 20+ years of qualitative research experience from 2 world-class universities to guide B2B SaaS companies to crush their churn and increase their net profits from the bottom up.‍‍