Retention Core Principles Checklist

Losing a client hurts, a lot.

Retention shouldn’t be a gut feel activity.There should be a science to it all.

Curious how the best agencies improve retention?

Read on below.

Improving retention comes down to a few things:

1. Frequency of client communication
2. Quality of client communication
3. Being able to easily see & track the above.

Often agencies get so caught up in the day to day, it’s VERY easy to lose track of which clients we’ve recently spoken to, and which ones we haven’t spoken to.

The number of clients we haven’t spoken to gets out of hand, very quickly.

And it’s often, a MUCH larger number than you think.

There are a few main goals when it comes to communication:

1. Communicate what you’re doing, and importantly, the value it brings

Clients should know exactly what you’re doing every day, every week.

1. Find unhappy customers immediately & turn them around 

The longer you wait, the harder it is to retain them.

1. Find happy customers & turn them into advocates

Up-sell/cross-sell them, ask for Google reviews or ask for referrals.

With that said, let’s dive into some core principles.

General Principles

The first 100 days are where the magic happens.

• Read Never Lose A Customer Again by Joey Coleman.
• Over-deliver value in this period, and lifetime value will increase significantly (and decrease churn).
• Make your client feel like a VIP - this starts at sales, and continues during the hand-off from sales, through onboarding the account (the sales to account management hand-over is a massive pain point for most clients)

Excel sheets & Slack channels do not scale.

• Use a CRM instead, in tandem with your project management tool.
• Excel sheets & Slack channels cannot be audited & monitored easily. 
• Keep these channels - but “official” communications must occur via emails & calls.

Monthly CSAT surveys are your crystal ball.

• Save clients before they leave you.
• Identify low-performing account managers before they churn clients.
• Identity account managers “dialling it in”.
• Uncover capacity issues early.

Make things easy to do.

• 1 question survey for CSAT
• 1 dashboard for each account manager to track key metrics
• 1 view of customers all within your CRM (not across the finance system, Excel & other places)

Create habits.

• Use the CRM’s retention dashboard as the single source of truth (delve into Excel for deeper data).
• The founder should use this weekly with their leadership team.
• The leadership team should use this weekly with their middle management.
• Middle management should use this weekly with their direct reports.
• You get the picture.

Measure 3 key metrics (not a hundred).

• Client retention, CSAT, Activity (frequency of client contact)
• Most have hundreds of things they measure - measure everything, and you measure nothing.

Remember, a big part of this is change management.

People love their Excel/Google sheets.

People love diving into a rabbit hole of data.

People love their hundreds of reports (which they barely use most of the time).

And - 

People hate change.

To make this successful, change needs to be enforced & practised from the top down.

Founders, it all starts with you.

Got questions on HR tips, receiving Glassdoor reviews, or anything else?

Say hello and we’ll lock in a time to chat through

Cheers,

Was