Customer Education as a Retention Strategy
November 20, 2006
Companies are pouring resources to achieve better customer service, which ultimately translates into increased loyalty. However, if the product fails to meet customer’s needs, satisfaction and hence the loyalty will be limited. We recently helped a client in diagnosing the high churn levels of newly acquired customers. After performing customer research on this segment, we realized that only about a quarter of the customers understood how their chosen product features compared to the spectrum of available offerings by our client.
Thus, many customers who were dissatisfied by their specific product features switched providers (rather than moving to a different plan with their existing provider) as they were unaware of the alternatives. This highlights the need of better customer education and experience during the sales process which is aligned with meeting the needs of the individual customers.
November 28, 2006 at 2:15 pm
I was linked to this post after you commented on my response to “The Long Tail” (http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/11/hits_and_niches.html) and I can see your point. However, when I think about removing pre-filters, I don’t think about overwhelming the customer with choices (which would have the result you mention). I think about not limiting the potential choices (which is what pre-filtering does) while still providing effective tools/automation to make sure customers find what they want quickly. Just because a lot of options are available does not mean they should all be presented to the customer in an undifferentiated list
Instead I would see automation being used to provide the most likely to be useful/acceptable/attractive while allowing a customer to drill into other options and the reasoning behind the original selection if they want to. Some customers will poke around and explore the choices but others will not. Combining the principles of the Long Tail with relevant automation is key.