It’s one thing to gain a new customer, but it’s another to ensure they keep coming back. Customer retention is just as important to your eCommerce business as customer acquisition, but poses its own challenges.
What is customer retention?
Customer retention refers to the ability of a company to keep a customer returning over time.
Although similar to customer loyalty, there is a difference between the two. Retention is more of a measure of how happy a company keeps its customers, while loyalty refers to the customer’s behavior.
But when customers’ needs are met, and a positive customer experience is a business’s top priority, retention and loyalty both grow.
What are some popular customer retention strategies?
Excellent customer service is a key part of retention, so we talked about strategy with Rachel Fefer, Director of Enterprise Partnerships at Gorgias— which is currently ranked as the top-rated helpdesk for eCommerce merchants.
Rachel’s advice can be seen in our “eComm Experts Video Series”, featuring actionable advice from leaders in the eCommerce industry.
In the following video, Rachel explains 4 strategies to increase customer retention:
- Better company response time
- Personalizing the customer experience
- Using data to avoid a disjointed customer journey
- Integrating popular business and marketing tools, like SMS
Click/tap to watch, or scroll past to read the transcript below.
Transcript:
We all know that customer retention and customer service go hand-in-hand. What are some of the biggest gaps that you think merchants overlook when it comes to customer service?
We typically see three major gaps when it comes to customer service.
First, we see challenges around response time.
We know that rapid response and resolution time equate to customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Returning customers are 9 times more likely to convert than a first time shopper.
However, we also know that the average resolution for eCommerce merchants is a staggering 80 hours.
And that’s a problem for customer retention because 90% of customers rate an immediate response as important or very important when they have a customer service question.
So answering customers’ questions swiftly is of huge importance to satisfaction and maintaining that loyalty.
Second, we see challenges around personalization of the experience.
A lack of data about the customer’s purchase history, social reviews, loyalty information, product reviews, marketplace purchases, and so on, mean a lost opportunity to engage in a meaningful way with the client—which is a lost opportunity to convert and expand lifetime value (LTV).
There’s plenty of data that merchants can collect about their customers from their eCommerce platforms. The integrated technologies from those platforms can be leveraged when interacting with a customer, and can help create connection.
Third, and this is probably the biggest challenge—there’s a lack of channel aggregation or a disjointed customer journey.
Consumers write to the merchant via email, or call, chat, post a comment on Facebook, and often they have to repeat themselves because the data about this person lives in silos in different systems.
Often, the customer speaks to the call center, warehouse, and retail store, and each place is unaware of your full story because they don’t have access to the same contact center software.
It’s the most frustrating experience when the brand doesn’t recognize you and your issue.
What are some examples of third-party systems, like a loyalty program or shipping integration, that can boost retention?
First and foremost, taking data from the eCommerce platform is hugely beneficial, whether you’re on Shopify, BigCommerce, or Adobe Commerce powered by Magento.
There’s so much data that can be used in the interaction: phone number, order history, order value, and so on. The brand can know if a customer is a VIP, or if their order is delayed.
You can learn their product review data, such as average score, number of reviews, or event AI sentiment. Imagine being able to respond directly to reviews.
This can all help to increase your customer retention.
Another example is integration of SMS, which is hugely popular now with consumers having email fatigue.
If you integrate your SMS platform like Attentive, Postscript, Omnisend, or Klaviyo then you can use the same support tool to answer SMS inquiries to drive sales and provide support help in a preferred channel of choice.
Can you think of any examples of eCommerce stores that you’ve known, who have really provided an excellent customer experience and improved retention rates?
Yes, SuperATV (who sells aftermarket products for utility-task vehicles and all-terrain vehicles) is a great example; their first-response time has decreased by 84%, from 2 hours to 19 minutes. Their resolution time for customer tickets has reduced by 82%, from 14 hours down to 2.5 hours.
Both of these have led to greater customer satisfaction and increased retention.
Bionic Gym is another example. They set out to increase their first-response time and resolution time about a year ago—formerly at 2 hours 24 minutes for first-response, and 9 hours resolution time.
The company focused on using rules and tagging of tickets to get insight into what works and doesn’t work, and decreased first response time to 1m 29s and resolution time to 17m 40s.
And centralized customer communication is a service that Gorgias specializes in, right? Why don’t you tell us a little about the company and how your services work?
At Gorgias, our goal and our mission is to help merchants grow with exceptional customer support.
About six yrs ago our founders realized there was a major gap in the market when it came to traditional helpdesks in three specific areas: automation, personalization, and channel aggregation.
Gorgias was created to resolve that gap, as a machine learning helpdesk, built natively for the eCommerce merchant, that aggregates all channels—email, voice, live chat, phone, Facebook, SMS—into one unified customer view.
And what we’re delivering—to increase efficiency, drive sales, and improve customer experience—are two things that others in the market are not providing: Speed of interaction, and personalization.
With that, we’re seeing an overall increase of 30% efficiency gains.
We’re personalizing the customer experience by pulling in data from platforms and from the rest of the tech stack. This creates meaningful connections with the customer.
We integrate with phone, rewards, SMS, email, you name it, all to provide a great customer experience and exceptional engagement.
Interested in learning more about customer retention through exceptional customer service? Contact Rachel at Gorgias: [email protected]
Or, reach out to us here at Shero.
Is there a specific eCommerce topic you’d like to learn more about? Leave a comment below or on our YouTube channel.
Gentian, CSO and co-founder of Shero Commerce, guides the company and client digital strategies. He's an expert in technical SEO, Inbound Marketing, and eCommerce strategy.
