4 Golden Customer Retention Questions That You Must Ask Today

In a recent survey done by PlanBeyond on owners of small businesses using easy to use CRM, more than 80 percent of those who participated in the survey felt optimistic about the businesses’ performance in 2019.

In this same report, it has also been noted that 51 percent of the small business owners pointed to one critical factor behind this optimism: the presence of a strong existing customer base.
In fact, this motivation was larger than those that cited about the quality of their employees, or their marketing and sales plans, as reasons as to why their business will prosper this year more than it did before.

Now we all know retaining old and existing customers is of much larger importance than acquiring new ones.

Nevertheless, there are very few business owners that proactively seek inputs from their high-paying customers to know if their brand’s services are truly meeting all expectations that the customers demand from their brand.
Not to mention the fact that even fewer ask their customers as to what more their business can do for the customers and cater to their needs.

This is why taking time to ask these four most important questions is critical not to just retain your key customers but to also keep them totally satisfied with your offerings.

The 4 Golden Customer Questions

Question #1

What did motivate you to look for what you purchased from our brand?

As owners of businesses, we create services and products that we think our customer needs and we also think that we know exactly what is needed by our customers.
For example, as an owner of a fitness studio, one can easily think that its services are all about providing professionals who are busy otherwise, with an easy to way to get their cardio exercises done before and in the spare times after their work. However, in reality, it can be that loyal customers of the fitness studio go to the studio since it offers low impact fitness regimes that best fit older bodies.

Now without asking this question all business owners, just like the owner of the fitness studio, will not know if the reason they developed their services are really the cause their customers are accepting their offerings.

This misunderstanding, on the part of the owner, may make them spend more time, money and resources developing and launching additional services and products that are of no interest to the existing customers of the brand or even alienate their best customers which can result in unprecedented customer churn.

Therefore creating a customer survey using an easy to use CRM software , is one of the best ways businesses can understand the requirements of their customers which can help in retaining existing customers by providing them exactly what they need from your business.

Question #2

Why did you choose to purchase from our business?

Let us take the same fitness studio as an example.  It can be natural that there were many other fitness options in that locality, right from large gyms to smaller fitness outlets that cater to 1:1 personal training.
Still then, there must be something unique that led the said fitness studio’s customers to choose them.

Therefore, asking customers to identify the main and important features that make your brand and business stand apart is an ideal way to find what matters to them the most.

This is because, if you are armed with this information, you can easily make sure that your marketing teams can continuously hit on these key value propositions while finding new customers using easy to use CRM for lead generation and nurturing, and not focus your attention on features your business may offer that your customers are not interested in.

Question #3

What experience did you find positive with our business?

When something is working well for your company, make sure you ask your customers what they liked so that you can keep doing it well.

Going back to our fitness studio example, consider that the fitness studio is offering a power-lifting class. Now as an owner of the fitness studio by asking this above-stated question to your loyal customers, you might learn that most customers of your fitness studio appreciate that all the studio classes can be joined by people of different fitness levels and they like that your exercises can be modified to manage pre-existing injuries.

Now by asking this question, as an owner of your studio, you can quickly learn that power-lifting (which you thought about previously) would never be of interest to any of your existing customers but rather it can create misalignment with the services that your customers enjoy today.

Question #4

What can we do to provide you with better customer experience?

No matter how exceptional is your offerings, there are always several ways to do better or provide your consumers with more robust customer experience.

This is the exact reason why asking this question proactively matters since it is an excellent way to make sure that your customers are receiving complete customer satisfaction, as well as find out new opportunities where you can provide and up-sell additional products or services that your customers may want over time.

For example, going back to the fitness studio, let us assume that the studio’s classes begin from 8.30AM; however, its loyal customers frequently asked for early-morning classes. Now, by asking this question, the owner of the studio can learn that investing in early start times will help them to retain their best customers, as well as bring in new customers who want their services but at an earlier hour of the day.

When should you ask these golden questions?

If you are a user of an easy to use CRM, you must know that regularly keeping your pulse on the customer sentiment by evaluating and performing sentiment analysis using information stored in the CRM database is the key to business growth.

Therefore, once you are considering expanding your business, be it in terms of products or services or a physical expansion, and you want to be confident that any new decisions that you take on incremental investment you can ask these questions to your customers that will further delight your customers and attract new batch of loyalists and help your business to increase its bottom line.