Losing customers is always an issue for any business. The constant ‘shift’ or ‘churn’ of customers is the phenomenon caused by this. It simply means that, instead of growing your customer base, you are constantly losing and adding new customers. This will not stop your business from remaining operational. It won’t even reduce your profits necessarily. However, it can severely limit your growth speed and potential, thus limiting the future of your moving business. That’s why it’s important to look for efficient ways for movers to reduce customer churn. In this article, Movers Development offers just that.
Understanding customer churn
If you want to reduce customer churn, the first step is understanding exactly why it’s happening. Now, it is admittedly difficult to analyze your own business subjectively. You can try and guess the cause all you like but there is one way to figure things out without fail – ask your customers. There are several routes you can take to do this. Offering questionnaires and similar is one. But, you can also literally call them up and talk to them. As a moving company, you have closer cooperation with customers than most other businesses. Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback.
Another practical way to get an objective opinion would be to turn to third-party companies. Getting a website marketing analysis for your business can offer you insight into different aspects of your business and how you can improve each of those aspects.
Engaging your customers
In order to reduce customer churn, you can’t just rely on talking to customers once they’ve left you. You need to stay in contact with your current customers in order to discourage them from leaving you easily. Customer engagement can help produce long-term brand loyalty, and ensure that they always think of your first when they need to move.
You can offer polls for ways to improve services. Or ask your customers about problems they’ve encountered in their interactions with your staff. Such active engagement while customers are still loyal will both allow you to improve your business and stop them from leaving in the first place. To do this, you will need to make full use of the benefits of CRM software, since keeping track of all the information without it would be difficult.
Listening to feedback
Once you do end up asking for feedback from customers, you need to actually follow the feedback you are provided with. If your customers can see that their opinion is valued, you can significantly reduce customer churn. At the same time, if they think that feedback from customers is just a waste of time and they will never see any improvements implemented, they will immediately abandon your company and look for your competitors instead. This is a precarious balancing act.
Following every piece of feedback is obviously impossible. Even more so because some feedback will simply not be reasonable or beneficial for you. However, if you can properly emphasize the feedback you do implement, it will do wonders for your brand’s image.
Offering incentives
Another way to reduce customer churn is to offer some sort of incentive to your customers. A good example would be periodical discounts or special promotions. If you have a moving supply store attached to your moving business, then it is the ideal target for such discounts.
Even if you provide vouchers for actual move discounts, you can pull it off and keep things profitable by offering them based on membership in a customer club or your mailing list, where people will receive such vouchers or discounts and you will have access to their email for the sake of marketing. Just like before when discussing customer engagement, you will need to use software for small moving companies to efficiently deal with all the customer data.
Up your marketing drive
Traditional marketing is not the most effective venue to reduce customer churn, but it still has some effect. If you properly develop a marketing strategy, you can come up with one that will both appeal to your old customers and reel in new ones. While it is admittedly important to hang onto your current customer base, you must not remember that growing it is also an essential step towards really improving your moving company. So, do not just focus on one to the exclusion of the other. That is a sure way to slowly drive your own moving business into the ground.
Emphasize all the good points
Another way to keep your customers interested is to remind them of why they chose you in the first place. While running your marketing strategy, remember to put effort into building a PR campaign, too. While the term may seem intimidating, it boils down to staying in touch with your community.
Most moving companies start somewhere, and you need to be able to cement yourself as a staple in the everyday life of your customers. This isn’t easy, since as a moving company, they do not need your services often. If you do offer moving supplies or storage facilities too, the task is a little bit easier. If you don’t, then you need to offer useful features on your website, such as a relocation cost calculator, that give people a reason to think about your company when it comes time to move.
Rely on softer methods
The final way to reduce customer churn is by using ‘softer’ methods. So far, everything we’ve discussed directly encouraged customers to choose you as their moving company. However, you can also just keep their attention and subtly hint at this. One example is running a blog, which will keep them coming back not for your services but for your content.
Social media accounts and even video guides and similar will all achieve a comparable response. This strategy is similar to the previous one, but less aggressive and pushy, which will often leave a better impression on the customer. Pair this with a responsive web design and SEO, as well as other quality site features, and you can impress them with the professionalism of your business as an added bonus.
Final advice
Now that you are familiar with the efficient ways for movers to reduce customer churn, you can start putting them into practice. While it is important to eventually use all of them, especially since most are quite compatible with various marketing schemes, we advise you not to rush. Trying to implement everything at once will likely overwhelm your employees and just make your business less efficient.
