Customer Retention during a Slow Economy

csm hero 1

Customer retention is the process of engaging with existing customers to continue buying your products or services. It’s one of the main factors to measure a business’s success. If customer retention is poor, there is a high probability that your business is in jeopardy.

With the current situation that we’re all experiencing, COVID-19 is definitely a hindrance to achieving 100% customer retention, and Gimbal is no exception to this. Tiffany Morin, VP of Customer Success for Gimbal, shared her incredible experience of how her customer success team dealt with the pandemic difficulties and how they managed to achieve a 100% retention rate, albeit serving the retail industry. 

Customer Retention Strategies

Gimbal had to act quickly with COVID-19 with questions posed in mind like “How could we keep them around to stay with us for another four to five years?”. 

“We knew that there would be certain industries that were more impacted. We knew that there would be certain customers that were more impacted.” – Tiffany Morin, Gimbal

Not only are you raising awareness about what’s going on at a store level, but you’re also shifting where they might be purchasing. It’s about being prescriptive, consulting, and advising your customers about what would be beneficial and helpful to them. It wasn’t just the customer success team that worked to achieve 100% customer retention, but also the finance and sales teams. They fused and functioned in unison to come up with one cohesive company, COVID-19 action plan.

Factors to Consider in Prioritizing the Customer Accounts

In prioritizing customer accounts, it is helpful to ask questions like “Does this customer have a high risk of bankruptcy? What’s their overall financial health?”. According to Tiffany, they have partnered with their customers to understand their financial situation at the moment (considering the burdens of COVID-19). To sum up, the four factors that come into play are as follows:

  • Payment history
  • Customer’s financial health
  • Renewal date 
  • Annual contract value

In a nutshell, the core of a customer success team is understanding the customers’ needs and business outcomes. This is to ensure that every customer achieves the desired outputs while using your product or service. 

This role of the customer success team in an organization would help not only to drive sales and traffic but to achieve 100% customer retention.

“I think this is all a new normal for us. It opens up numerous opportunities for customer success: new ways of engaging with our customers better than we have before, and I see only positive things long term coming out of COVID-19.” – Tiffany Morin, VP Customer Success for Gimbal.

Covid19 Impact on Saas Customer Success

How can CSM Practice Help!

At CSM Practice we accelerate SaaS companies’ profitable growth through customer retention strategies. Whether you’ve already begun to create a customer success strategy, or you’re just about to, our Customer Success Strategy Assessment will help you boost the process of creating customized retention management strategies to reduce churn and help your users achieve success.

CSM Practice specializes in the technology and services industry and offers a portfolio of enterprise solutions, that wish to achieve successful and scalable results. CSM Practice offers a particular customer-centered approach that helps you to develop a winning plan for the success of your client.

Take it to the next level!  Ask CSM Practice about the services we provide and learn how we can help you transform your organization into success.

NATIVIDAD DENSON JADE G
Written By:
Denson Jade G. Natividad

Denson is a researcher, educator, and certified Customer Success Consultant. Working as a writer at CSM Practice, he authors in-depth blogs about customer success and strategies that teach professional teams and corporate individuals ways to manage, grow, and scale their day-to-day business operations. Denson obtained his bachelor’s degree in communication in 2017. Right after graduation, he continued to pursue his master’s degree in Communication major in Applied Media Studies.