Retain Customers by Following Salesforce Implementation Best Practices

The ability of a business to survive and grow in today’s competitive market boils down to one thing: customers.

A thriving customer base does not just come from acquiring new clients. An improved customer retention rate will improve your profitability, boost loyalty, and your chances of getting more referral business from satisfied customers.

Customer retention is important, however many companies tend to focus more on customer acquisition as they find it more challenging to increase customer lifetime value.

How does your business fare on the customer retention front?

An effective way to improve customer retention is Salesforce Implementation Services.

Salesforce, a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform brings a suite of tools that can be used to manage fruitful client relationships, key to improving customer retention and increasing revenue.

Here in this blog, we will develop a comprehensive understanding of why customer retention rate matters and how Salesforce implementation best practices can help you improve retention.

So, let’s get started.

Why Does Customer Retention Rate Matter?

In business, the customer retention rate is a metric that indicates the percentage of customers who decide to use the company’s products and services for a long period. This reflects the quality of service and satisfaction your business provides over time.

Here’s an example of why customer retention is important:

Let’s say you own a small accounting firm that specializes in tax preparation and accounting. In the first quarter of the financial year, you have 100 customers; by the end of the year, 80 of those customers have returned for additional services while 20 have moved to your competitors.

Based on this scenario, your client retention rate would be 80%. In other words, 80% of your existing clients stayed with you and 20% moved to your competition.

Now, let’s assume each of your clients brings in an average revenue of $1,000 annually. Since your client retention rate is 80%, which means you have lost 20 clients and $20,000 in revenue annually.

The more you retain your clients, the more revenue and profits you’ll generate. Furthermore, retaining clients is 10 times less expensive than acquiring new clients.

A study conducted by Harvard Business School found that a 5% improvement in client retention rate can increase an organization’s profitability by 95%.

Now that you understand why customer retention rate matters, read on for more details on how Salesforce implementation best practices can help you increase customer retention.

Salesforce Implementation Best Practices For Better Customer Retention

1. Get to Know Your Customers Well

Understanding a customer’s problems and finding solutions that work to resolve those problems efficiently and effectively is the first step in building a profitable relationship. Salesforce implementation best practices can be of great assistance in this endeavor.

With the help of Salesforce Customer 360, it enabled marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service teams to collaborate on a single platform. By leveraging the shared view of customer data, teams can segment audiences, create targeted campaigns, and identify sales opportunities to make sure clients receive the best level of service, which will improve retention.

2. Give Your Employees the Power to Succeed

Employees of the organization have access to a variety of tools that are vital for ensuring a successful customer experience.

By using Salesforce’s instant messaging platform, Slack, employees can communicate and share information, empowering them to provide better support to customers.

Einstein AI also facilitates the automation of repetitive tasks, freeing up employees to solve complex problems and provide creative solutions that reward businesses with happy customers. Further, AI can assess the conversion potential of each lead by assigning scores and gradations. This will enable employees to prioritize their efforts toward leads that are more likely to convert into sales.

Mulesoft links all organization data inside and outside of the CRM so that it can be readily accessible and centralized. Tableau can provide real-time analytics and data visualization to support data-driven decision-making.

3. Personalized Communication With Customers

A personalized communication strategy is a great way to engage customers and provide an experience beyond their expectations.

The Salesforce platform provides a great deal of valuable insight into the behavior, purchase history, and preferences of customers. Based on this information, personalized communication can be built with prospects to produce better conversions and an experience that leads to improved retention in the future.

By analyzing how your customers interact with your brand, Salesforce allows companies to categorize them into different segments. Businesses can create strategies for each segment and target multiple customers with similar interests in one instance to yield better results with minimal inputs.

4. Activate Inactive Customers

To increase customer retention, engaging inactive customers and motivating them to act are among the best methods. Entertaining new customers while keeping the existing connection with your brand is time-consuming and requires vast resources.

This hurdle can be eased to the greatest extent by following Salesforce implementation best practices. Through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can automate customer engagement with inactive customers by sending them emails, mobile messages, ads, and more that are focused on their needs. With real-time data from the cloud, marketers can expect a high level of personalization at every stage of communication to turn existing customers into repeat customers.

5. Leverage the Popularity of Salesforce

Today, social media can be one of the most powerful tools a company can use to enhance retention rates by offering a truly outstanding customer experience. With the help of social media, markets can connect with both new and existing customers directly.

The Salesforce Essentials package allows you to connect with your customers across a variety of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube in one place, thereby eliminating the need to monitor each individually.

With an abundance of customer information available, it is possible to create social media marketing campaigns tailored to the users’ needs to ensure maximum engagement.

6. Loyalty Program

Customer loyalty programs offer rewards, discounts, and other special incentives to encourage customers to stay with you.

Loyalty Management is an end-to-end solution built on the Salesforce platform that comes with a range of features that enable marketers to design loyalty programs and manage members intuitively.

The easy-to-use interface of the Salesforce solution enables you to set up and manage loyalty programs from beginning to end. Leveraging data from Customer 360, personalization can be applied to loyalty programs to make them more informative.

Challenges in Salesforce Implementation and Strategies to Address Them

Salesforce is a powerful CRM that helps businesses manage their marketing, sales, and service operations more effectively. However, there are some challenges in Salesforce implementation to make sure Salesforce capabilities are effectively utilized for a business. Let’s explore a few of the most common challenges involved in Salesforce implementation and how to get rid of them:

1. Reluctance to Change

It is one of the most challenging aspects of implementing Salesforce. As Salesforce is adopted, it is expected to affect almost all verticals of an organization, from marketing to sales to customer support. Several factors might contribute to people resisting change in these departments, including mistrust, lack of confidence, fear of losing a job, fear of failure, etc.

Solution: The best practice to overcome the resistance of people to Salesforce adoption is keeping them engaged in the implementation process from the beginning. As part of their readiness for Salesforce, they should understand why their organization would like to use it and how it can increase efficiency and productivity.

2. Lack of Quality Data

Salesforce is heavily reliant on the data to generate reports & analytics to enable organizations to make better decisions based on that data.

According to Gartner, the lack of quality data is among the most common reasons behind the failure of Salesforce implementation.

Solution: Data cleansing is one of the best strategies to deal with poor data quality. It ensures the elimination of data that is outdated, inaccurate, and non-credible to foster Salesforce adoption. For maintaining accuracy, you can also establish data validation rules and continually review & update the data.

3. Integration Challenges

When it comes to Salesforce’s integration with other systems, it can be quite a challenging process. Incompatibilities between Salesforce and other systems can create issues with data synchronization.

Solution: Experienced Salesforce implementation Partners can access your integration requirements and create a customized Salesforce Integration solution plan to make sure your Salesforce implementation satisfies your needs.

4. Deficiencies in Training

Salesforce’s success depends heavily on how well your team utilizes its great capabilities. Training deficiencies will put you at a serious disadvantage when trying to streamline your business operations with Salesforce.

Investing in CRM without adequate training can also result in your business losing money since your team will stick with the old way because they are comfortable with it.

Solution: Train all your users thoroughly on Salesforce’s different features and functionalities so they are comfortable using it. Educate everyone in your organization about the benefits Salesforce offers so they will feel motivated as they learn about the system.

5. Selection of Wrong Salesforce Implementation Consulting Partner

The selection of the Salesforce implementation consulting partner has a profound impact on the success of your Salesforce implementation.

Solution: Make sure your chosen Salesforce partner has experience with implementing business solutions using Salesforce. It is best to hire a Salesforce developer who holds Salesforce certificates to demonstrate their expertise.

Salesforce Implementation Cost Breakdown

The cost of Salesforce implementation services is the result of multiple factors such as:

• Salesforce development project complexity
• Salesforce consultant
• Number of users
• Level of CRM customization
• Integration of CRM with other systems
• User adaptation
• Maintenance and further support

As each organization has different needs when it comes to Salesforce development, the factors differ accordingly. Therefore calculating accurate estimations regarding the cost is not feasible prior to having a clear understanding of your requirements. You can walk through the Salesforce CRM pricing guide and get a better understanding of how Salesforce structures the pricing for the products that it offers.

Leveraging the Power of Salesforce to Maximize Retention Rate

Salesforce has many opportunities to help organizations increase their retention rates. The Salesforce customer-first strategy can help you establish your identity in a competitive market that values customer satisfaction and success.

Conclusion

Salesforce’s platform has a lot of great features that will help your customer retention rate skyrocket. If you are looking for someone to help you exploit the full potential of Salesforce CRM for your business, then Cyntexa is just the place for you.

We are honored to be recognized as a Salesforce Crest (Gold) consulting partner, with expertise in Salesforce consulting services leading to the successful adoption of CRM for over 560+ customers worldwide.

Let us know what you want to accomplish with your business and we will be there to guide you until your goals are achieved.