Tracking customer retention metrics is fundamental to building a sustainable business. Maintaining current customer relationships is significantly more cost-effective than acquiring new ones.
This means monitoring and improving your customer retention rate should be one of your business priorities.
Loyal customers bring multiple benefits beyond direct revenue. They become brand advocates, provide word-of-mouth marketing, offer constructive feedback, and contribute to product improvements making customer retention an essential indicator.
With that, measuring customer churn is equally important as tracking retention as it provides insights into why your customers leave. Understanding your customers loyalty is a combination of looking into your retention rate and churn rate.
To truly understand customer loyalty patterns, businesses need to monitor various customer retention metrics.
Key pointers:
- Customer retention rate, or CRR, is the percentage of customers who stick with your business over a specific time period.
- Calculating your customer retention rate will show you how loyal your customers are and how valuable your offering is to them. The higher your CRR is, the more successful your product or solution will be.
- Some of the strategies you can adopt to improve your customer retention rate are focusing on continuous product improvement, offering exceptional customer service, improving your customer onboarding process, and using an AI-powered platform to eliminate the need for multiple platforms.
What is customer retention rate?
Customer retention rate measures how many customers continue to do business with a company over time. A high retention rate means customers are satisfied and loyal, helping businesses grow and increase revenue.
Understanding retention rate requires looking beyond simple percentages. For instance, if your business starts with 100 customers and keeps 80 by year’s end, your basic retention rate is 80%. However, this number can be misleading if not calculated correctly. New customers gained during this period shouldn’t be included in your retention calculations, as this would give you an inaccurate view of customer loyalty.
Your retention rate serves as an indicator, revealing the effectiveness of your customer experience, product value, and service quality. When tracked consistently, this metric helps you make data-driven decisions to improve customer satisfaction.
Why is it important to calculate customer retention rate?
Customer retention rate is important because it directly measures your business’s ability to keep customers satisfied and loyal over time, impacting revenue, growth, and profitability. It’s an important indicator that helps businesses make informed decisions about their customer relationships.
When retention rates drop, you can take immediate action - whether it’s improving customer support, enhancing product features, or addressing service issues.
Strong retention also creates a competitive advantage. Satisfied long-term customers often become brand advocates, naturally attracting new business through recommendations and positive reviews, creating a sustainable growth cycle.
How to calculate customer retention rate (CRR)?
To calculate your customer retention rate (CRR), you need to determine 4 things:
- Time frame you want to calculate CRR for, whether it’s a month, quarter, or year.
- Total number of customers you had at the start of this time frame
- Total number of customers left at the end of this time period.
- Number of new customers you gained during the same time frame.
Once you’ve arrived at these 4 numbers, apply the following formula to calculate your customer retention rate:
Formula to calculate CRR = ((E - N) / S) x 100
S: Total number of customers you had at the start of a specific time frame, whether it’s a month, quarter, or year.
E: The total number of customers you have at the end of the chosen period.
N: Number of new customers you gained during the same time frame.
Here’s an example of calculating CRR:
Suppose you started the year with 500 customers (S), acquired 30 new customers (N), and ended the year with 480 customers (E). Here’s how you calculate your CRR:
CRR = ((480 - 30) / 500) x 100
= (450 / 500) x 100
= 0.9 x 100
= 90%
In this scenario, your annual CRR is 90%, which is a strong indicator of customer loyalty and satisfaction.
But how do you get here? What strategies do you need to apply to increase your customer retention rate? That’s exactly what we’re about to see next.
12 expert strategies for improving your customer retention rate (CRR)
An analysis by McKinsey and Company shows that top-performing SaaS companies have median net retention rates of 120% or more—which means these businesses deliver 20% growth every year without adding a single new customer.
So, if you want a thriving business that not only attracts new customers but retains the existing customers, your goal should be improving your CRR over time.
Here are 12 strategies we’ve curated to help you constantly enhance your customer retention rate:
1. Focus on continuous product improvement
Improving your product isn’t just about adding new elements but also refining what you offer to suit your evolving customer base better.
Such a proactive strategy is critical to maintaining a competitive edge, keeping your product relevant, and ensuring customer engagement and satisfaction after the holiday season. This approach retains customers and turns them into advocates for your business.
2. Offer exceptional customer support
Excellent customer service is more than just resolving customer issues; it’s a whole strategy for giving customers a smooth, customized experience. This means:
- Paying close attention to their concerns to comprehend their requirements,
- Giving them expert guidance tailored to their specific situation, and
- Making sure your customers feel valued and appreciated.
Statistics show that 73% of customers consider their overall customer experience a significant factor in their purchase decisions. So, it’s certainly worth paying attention to.
3. Communicate proactively with customers
Proactive communication entails regular updates, sharing valuable content, and keeping customers in the loop about the latest developments within your business.
This ongoing dialogue not only keeps them connected to your brand but also serves as a tangible demonstration of your commitment to their satisfaction and engagement.
4. Build a community
When you establish a customer community through dedicated forums or social media groups, you provide users with a valuable platform to connect, interact, share their experiences, and extend a helping hand to one another.
This sense of belonging and camaraderie is instrumental in building lasting customer retention. They don’t just use your product or service; they actively participate in a community that revolves around it.
Moreover, a thriving customer community is a treasure trove of insights and solutions. Customers within the community share their experiences, offer tips, and troubleshoot common issues.
5. Organize loyalty programs
Programs to boost customer loyalty can incentivize customers by offering rewards or benefits for their continued patronage. These incentives can take various forms, including discounts, access to exclusive features, and referral rewards.
Customer loyalty programs boost customer retention and increase the frequency of customers returning to your business, fostering ongoing engagement and activity. The aim is to not only keep customers coming back but also to transform them into active promoters of your brand.
6. Collect customer feedback often
Frequent feedback collection through surveys, feedback forms, polls, emails, or social media engagement, is a valuable tool to understand your customers needs and preferences. It allows you to make data-driven decisions that can lead to improvements aligned with what matters most to your customers.
Regular feedback collection demonstrates your commitment to continuously improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.
7. Implement dynamic pricing strategies
Keeping your pricing strategies dynamic involves thoughtful adjustment of service or product pricing based on customer behavior, engagement levels, and other relevant factors. It’s a strategic approach that keeps customers engaged and encourages continued usage of your services while ensuring they receive a tailored and value-driven offer.
For instance, you may offer your most loyal, long-term customers discounted rates, providing them with a personalized pricing experience. Alternatively, you can offer customized pricing to high-usage customers, ensuring they receive a tailored deal that suits their needs.
8. Enable integrations to build ecosystems
Enabling API integrations with other software tools and building an ecosystem around your product is crucial to retain your customers. Why? It reduces friction for customers who rely on multiple tools, as they can seamlessly work together. An integrated ecosystem increases customer satisfaction and loyalty by offering a comprehensive solution to their needs.
For example, the Snap-Ins feature of DevRev empowers users to seamlessly integrate their preferred apps and tools, unlocking powerful capabilities through their combined functionality. This not only enhances user convenience but also significantly boosts productivity, making it an invaluable asset for businesses looking to streamline their operations and provide top-notch customer support.
9. Improve your user onboarding
Studies show that complicated onboarding processes for SaaS platforms can make 74% of potential customers switch to other solutions. So, having a frictionless user onboarding process is a non-negotiable to increase customer retention and decrease churn.
The onboarding process should communicate your solution’s benefits to the customers and give the tools they need to succeed. To make your onboarding process solid, ensure you have personalized workflows that comprises well-timed email triggers, follow-up messaging, access to knowledge base and other self-service resources, and collecting frequent feedback to better optimize the onboarding process.
10. Use gamification to hook customers
Gamification is applying game mechanics to customer service to increase customer engagement, and ultimately, customer retention.
Implementing B2B gamification methods, like virtual rewards that can be redeemed for real-world rewards, progress bars, leaderboards, and quizzes, can help you boost customer experience. However, make sure you implement any gamification strategy after understanding customer expectations, especially when it comes to your product and industry to make gamification relevant and valuable to them.
11. Apologize sincerely when things go wrong
Like everything else in life, sometimes things won’t go as per plan in your business. Things could go awry sometimes, like a faulty update, erroneous billing, or unplanned downtime.
When such problems pop up, tender a sincere apology to your customers. Your apology should include taking ownership of the problem, explanation for why it happened, and the solution. This reassures your customers that you’re putting their interests first, and can convince them to stick with you.
12. Use AI-powered support software
Customer service and support come with multiple functionalities and tasks, and it’s only common sense to use tools to automate these. But using multiple tools come with unintended consequences like data fragmentation and manual handling of customer queries, which limits your ability to scale as an organization.
The solution? Using an AI-powered support platform like DevRev. Its native AI capabilities help you reduce manual efforts in resolving repetitive questions and unify customer and product experience to avoid data fragmentation. As a result, you’ll deliver enhanced customer support and boost your customer retention rate.
Read how Spotnana improved their customer experience using DevRev.
4 key metrics you should track with CRR
While customer retention rate (CRR) is an important metric for assessing the health of your business, it’s important to recognize other key metrics that complement CRR and provide a more holistic view of your business’s performance.
Here are 4 other metrics you need to track alongside CRR:
- Customer churn rate: The churn rate is the flip side of CRR. It measures the percentage of customers who discontinue their subscription during a specific time period. A low customer churn rate is a positive sign, while a high churn rate can be a red flag, indicating issues that need attention.
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures customer loyalty and satisfaction by asking a simple question: “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?” Users are categorized as promoters, passives, or detractors. A high NPS indicates satisfied customers who are likely to refer your product or solution to others.
- Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): CLV quantifies the total revenue a customer is expected to generate during their entire relationship with your business. This metric helps you understand the long-term value of a customer and can guide decisions regarding customer acquisition and retention efforts.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): CSAT measures customer satisfaction by asking them to rate their level of satisfaction with your product or service. It’s typically measured with a single question and provides a quick snapshot of customer sentiment.
Improve your customer retention rate
Want to keep customers coming back while spending less on finding new ones? Start by understanding how many customers stay with your business over time. When you know these numbers, it’s easier to make smart decisions about keeping customers happy.
Make sure to ask your customers what they think. While numbers are important, your customers’ feedback is pure gold. When people spend their time and money with your business, their opinions can show you exactly how to make their experience better.
Simple conversations with customers often reveal more than complex reports. Their suggestions might point out easy fixes you hadn’t thought of, helping you create experiences that make them want to stay. When customers feel heard and valued, they’re more likely to stick around.
DevRev helps you boost customer retention by bringing your product and support experiences together in one unified platform. Our AI-native platform features a self-learning support system that resolves issues instantly, often before customers even need to ask. With smart search capabilities and proactive issue resolution, customers can find answers quickly through in-app chat or self-service portals. This means faster solutions for customers and more efficient support teams
Looking to boost your customer retention? Discover how with DevRev
