How to Increase Customer Retention

While attracting new customers is important, retaining existing ones is often more cost-effective and reliable for sustaining revenue over time. Businesses that excel in customer retention build long-term relationships and benefit from increased customer loyalty, repeat business, and positive word-of-mouth referrals.

Dynamics 365 Sales is a powerful tool designed to help businesses increase customer retention by enhancing client tracking and relationship management. With its advanced features, this CRM platform provides insights to understand customer needs, anticipate their preferences, and engage them more effectively.

According to results from our survey State of the Sales Industry: Navigating Technology and AI Innovation in 2024, 34.5 percent of sales professionals believe their sales process would benefit most from CRM updates focused on better client tracking. In other words, their processes would improve if they had access to more tools supporting customer retention. In this article, we will explore why customer retention is so important and how Dynamics 365 Sales can help you boost customer retention rates.

Guide to Moving from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales

Why is Customer Retention so Important?

Studies show that, depending on your industry, it can cost five to seven times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one. Existing customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and spend more on your products or services over time. By focusing on customer retention, businesses can maximize the return on their marketing and sales investments while reducing the need to pour resources and FTEs into costly customer acquisition programs.

Loyal customers not only provide consistent revenue but also support growth. They act as brand advocates, promoting your business through positive word-of-mouth, online discussion, and public reviews. Organic approaches to growth like this are some of the most effective forms of marketing, as potential customers are more likely to trust recommendations from friends or family. By cultivating loyalty, businesses can create a network of satisfied customers who help attract new clients without significant marketing spending.

Common Challenges in Customer Retention

Customers do not want a cookie-cutter relationship with a brand. If they hold a positive opinion of you, they will come to expect more direct, personalized interactions and experiences. Two of the most common reasons customer retention rates drop are:

A lack of personalization in experiences and customer journeys
Inconsistent communication and follow-up

Lack of Personalization

Some businesses need access to better data-driven customer insight to understand their clients’ preferences, needs, and behaviors. This lack of personalization can lead to genetic interactions that fail to resonate with customers, making them more likely to switch to competitors who offer more tailored experiences.

Inconsistent Engagement

When businesses fail to maintain regular contact with their clients or only reach out sporadically, they miss opportunities to strengthen relationships and address customer concerns as they arise. This inconsistency can leave customers feeling undervalued or forgotten, and therefore increase the likelihood of churn. Consistent and meaningful interactions are essential for keeping customers satisfied over the long term.

Leverage Dynamics 365 Sales for Better Client Tracking

Dynamics 365 Sales centralizes your customer data into a single, cloud-based platform so teams throughout your organization can get 360-degree perspectives on each client. Do sales want to check their quarterly closing figures? Does marketing want to know which prospects are most engaged with their latest campaign? Does the support team want to research why a client cares about one of your product’s more obscure features? D365 can help answer all those questions on the same, unified platform.

Taking a centralized approach like this allows sales teams to access up-to-date information, such as a client’s purchase history, communication logs, and organizational preferences. With all relevant data in one place, businesses can better understand their customers, anticipate their needs, and deliver more personalized and effective service.

D365 Sales also offers real-time insights into customer behavior and their engagement with your company. It can track customer interactions across various touchpoints, like with web apps, email conversations, and webinar attendance, providing sales teams with timely data that informs live sales team member interactions. These insights enable businesses to respond quickly to customer inquiries, address concerns proactively, and capitalize on emerging opportunities, ensuring that every interaction is relevant and valuable.

Key Features of Dynamics 365 Sales for Increasing Customer Retention

Dynamics 365 for Sales has a rich feature set, but a few features, in particular, stand out for their ability to support better customer retention.

Personalized Customer Journeys

D365 Sales helps businesses create personalized customer journeys tailored to their preferences and specific interactions with your company. By leveraging the deep sea of customer data collected by D365, you can segment customers and design customized experiences that resonate more consistently. You will make each interaction more relevant, fostering stronger connections and longer-term loyalty.

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AI-Driven Recommendations from Microsoft Copilot

Dynamics 365 Sales now features Microsoft’s Copilot, a versatile AI assistant. It can analyze large customer data sets and identify meaningful trends in their engagement, communication, and purchase histories that your sales team might not otherwise notice. It can make actionable recommendations about how, when, and where to engage customers to meet your goals—closing a deal, furthering their journey with your company, or maximizing engagement, as discussed here.

Automated Follow-Ups

One of the standout features of Dynamics 365 Sales is its automated follow-up capabilities. D365 can schedule and send follow-up emails, reminders, and notifications based on predefined triggers, ensuring no customer feels stranded. Copilot can even write or suggest follow-up content for you, saving your sales team from churning through one stock email after another.

Strategies for Customer Retention with Dynamics 365 Sales

Using Dynamics 265 for Sales to manage customers allows you to easily and effectively carry out some important retention strategies.

Segmentation

With Dynamics 365 Sales, businesses can easily segment their customer base using criteria such as purchasing behavior, engagement history, or demographics. Once segmented, you can craft targeted messaging that will best resonate with each group.

Proactive Engagement

Dynamics 365 Sales facilitates proactive engagement through automated alerts and notifications that remind sales teams to reach out at key moments, such as after a purchase, during a contract renewal period, or when a customer exhibits signs of disengagement. These timely interactions show customers that their business is valued, helping to prevent churn, and encouraging long-term loyalty.

Integrating Customer Feedback

D365 Sales also allows businesses to collect and analyze feedback from various channels, such as surveys, social media, and direct interactions. Collecting feedback this way allows for better qualitative as well as quantitative analyses using Copilot. By analyzing their feedback, businesses can identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, enabling them to make data-driven adjustments that enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Dynamics 365 is a Transformative Sales Tool

By centralizing customer data, automating data entry, and leveraging AI, Dynamics 365 Sales ensures that sales teams are best equipped to maximize customer retention. You can enhance decision-making and streamline sales processes thanks to Copilot’s AI-driven insights and deep analytics capabilities. D365 Sales empowers all your customer-focused professionals to operate more effectively. Our experts can help you maximize your sales investments and level up your operations.

Frequently Asked Questions

#1 What is the Biggest Key to Customer Retention?

Delivering exceptional customer experience is the biggest key to customer retention. To do so, companies must consistently provide high quality service, personalize their customer interactions, and have responsive customer support. Taking the time to build strong customer relationships, maintain open communication, and provide ongoing value will all contribute to improving customer retention.

#2 What Causes Poor Customer Retention?

Many factors can contribute to poor customer retention. Inconsistent service quality, poor customer service, and lack of customer engagement all contribute to poor retention rates. If businesses fail to meet customer expectations, customers often become dissatisfied and begin looking for alternate options.

#3 What is a Good Customer Retention Rate?

This rate can be industry-specific, but a retention rate of 85% or higher is generally considered strong.