To survive an economic downturn, businesses need to innovate. With uncertainty ahead, now is the time to examine what you can do differently to navigate the rough seas ahead.
Given the high cost of acquiring a new customer compared to retaining an existing one, proactive retention makes business sense. By enhancing your customer engagement strategy, you can plug any leaks that are causing customers to leave.
We examine the economic climate and what businesses are doing to take a proactive approach to customer retention.
Warnings from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund indicate that we may spiral towards a global recession. This will impact the Australian economy, although Treasurer Jim Chalmers is confident we will avoid the full brunt of the recession.
On home shores, it’s not all smooth sailing.
Cost Price Index (CPI) growth — 7.3% in the 12 months to September 2022 — far exceeds Wage Price Index (WPI) growth — 3.1% in the same period. Upward pressure on the cost of living without corresponding wage increases will no doubt have consequences on household spending.
Nonetheless, consumers are optimistic, even if only cautiously so.
Over the pandemic years, three in four consumers switched their spending behaviours, opting to experiment with new products and services. Many of these consumers have shifted their loyalties, choosing not to return to the brands they had purchased in the past.
Global economic and political forces are significantly disrupting the landscape, household budgets are under pressure, and brand loyalty is losing influence over consumer purchasing behaviour. It’s certainly a challenging time for businesses.
When times are tough, retaining customers can be difficult. But with the cost of acquiring new customers as much as 25 times higher, investing in proactive retention is wise.
At the same time that the economy is wobbling, businesses are also facing digital transformation at an incredible pace.
Consumers have increasingly high expectations of their multi-channel interactions with businesses, from sales to marketing and support. They also expect marketing personalisation and convenience to purchase when and where they need to.
The opportunity here is to innovate and deliver on customer expectations with moments of truth that matter.
Investing in maximising your customer engagement and retention strategy is an investment in the financial stability of the business. Even a slight lift in your customer retention rate can have a significant impact on the business's bottom line.
With such a big focus on multi-channel customer engagement, the simplest difference you can make with the biggest impact is with a customer retention platform.
Tools like Pendula are available to help automate customer retention, so why not make the most of them?
Pendula works as a digital communication platform and allows you to start powerful customer conversations. As a no-code platform, Pendula will enable you to integrate your customer data and set up automated customer engagement workflows. You free up internal resources to focus their efforts where it matters most while Pendula reinvigorates your customer experience.
If you’re ready to learn more on how to implement a customer engagement strategy to manage proactive retention, we are here to help. Talk to an expert about how Pendula can work for your business and your customers.
Pendula is a proactive retention platform focused on increasing customer lifetime value by reducing churn and driving upsells.
At Pendula, we power personalised customer conversations with our no-code platform, without engaging IT or developers. Automate customer engagement with workflows informed by actual data and insights.