Every month, we bring you the best resources from the internet to help you navigate customer retention and customer experience issues.

This edition of VOZIQ’s Customer Intelligence Newsletter includes a handful of resources containing ideas and action plans for dealing with the current pandemic and preparing for the future while still keeping your customers at the forefront.

We hope you will find this useful!

Five Recommendations to Ensure Customer Loyalty in the Post-COVID-19 Era 

COVID-19 has put the global business community under extreme pressure. While businesses have started to recover from this jolt, customer optimism is likely to take some time to return to the pre-crisis level. The demand is low. Customers are uncertain, delaying purchases and constantly browsing for better price tags, and even switching from their regular brands. In this scenario, customer retention has assumed a paramount role, especially for recurring revenue businesses. 

Dr. Vasudeva Akula has shared some excellent tips on creating effective customer loyalty strategies that we are sure you will find insightful. 

Customer Loyalty Definition, Statistics, and Tips 

Customer loyalty refers to customers rewarding a company with repeat business over time. It means that the company is successful at creating an experience that resonates with people since those customers actively decide to return again and again. 

You must know these customer loyalty statistics that demonstrate how true loyalty is earned, not bought. 

Customer Churn: You May Be Losing More than You Think 

A loyal customer base is the biggest asset of a business, and hence retention is a key priority for the bottom-line. Today, it is more crucial and, at the same time, challenging than ever. The most noticeable impact of churn is the loss of revenue in customer lifetime value. Consider a company with a one million customer base and about $500 average revenue per customer per year. A 20% annual churn rate would mean 200,000 customer cancellations and $10 million per year in lost revenue. 

To know more about how churn implications go beyond short-term revenue loss and significantly impact a company’s top-line growth, read this article. 

Three Ways ML Can Help with Customer Retention 

 Some customers are more valuable than others. The hard part is determining which valuable customers are happy and which are on the verge of leaving. Even when customer service or tech support is well aware that a customer is unhappy, this valuable intel may never reach that customer’s salesperson or customer success manager. This is where machine learning (ML) can make a great impact. 

1. Spot Unhappy Customers Before They Go 
2. Improve Products, Services, and Systems 
3. Transform Unhappy Customers into Brand Ambassadors 

Read more to understand how ML can do to help companies keep customer retention high. 

Conversational AI Mostly Effective but Falls Short in CX, Finds Study 

Chatbots are known for efficiency, and in a pandemic-stricken world like today, they are even more crucial to the customer journey when more businesses are turning to digital to reach a wider pool of consumers. It is also more effective in assisting consumers with their needs. That said, a recent study by Forrester, which surveyed 40 businesses across the Asia Pacific, showed that nearly 76% of firms believed that conversational AI improved resolution times during the pandemic. 

The majority of those surveyed (80%) said chatbots produced more negative experience than positive or neutral ones during the pandemic. While conversational AI fared well in efficiency, Forrester found that it did not do as well for customer experience. To know more about these insights, read this article. 

Customer Service Trends for 2021: Top Analyst Predictions 

Service leaders are facing the implications of the pandemic in a triple whammy of a changing employee work environment, evolving customer expectations, and the economic/operational impact of the coronavirus pandemic – in other words, staying safe, cutting costs, and keeping the customers satisfied. 

Backed by insights and perspectives following a year of crisis, analyst firms will play a significant post-pandemic role in helping organizations navigate the new reality. Take a look at these five key customer service trends that leading analyst firms agree on. 

How to Regain Customer Trust in 2021 

A survey Forrester Research conducted about how well companies provided guidance through the pandemic found that U.S. respondents’ trust was in shambles—only 13 percent said they trusted retailers, and the number was even lower for technology companies, travel companies, and several other sectors. Healthcare providers fared best but were still at only 58 percent, meaning that a whopping 42 percent of respondents did not trust even healthcare providers to provide effective guidance through the pandemic. 

To effectively earn the trust of wary customers, companies are going to need to do better.  Know more about interesting customer lifecycle metrics in this article.