Customer retention can certainly be a significant part of marketing. It is mainly through marketing actions that can enhance and increase customer retention by seeking to explore tools such as relationship and loyalty marketing as well as database and permission marketing.
All of those tools and modes of marketing have one component in common; the behavioral aspects of a given group of end-user are used to devise techniques to maximize sales. The major difference, however, is that such a behavioral approach to creating and maintaining loyalty is accompanied by additional steps, such as collecting data in terms of a particular campaign’s return on investment, and customer feedback, as well as further analysis of such data, to improve future offers.
At World Consulting Group, customer retention is ranked only second to customer satisfaction. World Consulting Groups’ stakeholders maintain a philosophy and desire to retain every single client by understanding that customer satisfaction is the most important factor in customer retention. Hence, using all available tools and expertise to achieve predetermined results establishes a credible and viable partnership with clients.
Such an approach is certainly accompanied by many advantages, including the establishment of long-term relationships that are based on trust and results, unique and in-depth insight into the internal organizational dynamics of the client’s organization, the establishment of relationships reaching deep into the organization, as well as acquiring expertise within the client industry and niche.
Additional benefits may not be obvious or significant at first, such as the ability to synchronize required actions in terms of executing plans, the ability to get feedback from within the company and frontline workers, and the ability to reduce overall costs based on long-term income. Ultimately, there are many benefits to acquiring and maintaining a long-term relationship with clients. The benefits depend on many factors, including industry and expertise-based, client overall goals and attitude, organizational willingness, and ability to adapt.
Nevertheless, there are certainly some assumed liabilities to creating loyal customers. The proponents of such theories may argue that customer loyalty may lead to unreasonable expectations both on the client side as well as the service provider, create an informal relationship that may lead to inaccuracies and less than the best efforts on both sides, encourage self-promoting decisions and actions, jeopardize the neutrality of service provider, as well as encouraging an environment of dependency.
At World Consulting Group, such theories and claims are considered yet flatly rejected. Though such criticism is valid in theory, it is simply too unpractical and self-defeating to be considered a risk factor. Most of the above points of dispute fall within what most businesses should and will consider simply a nonsustainable way to conduct business. It is no secret that return customers may be one of the rather significant contributors to a sustainable and profitable venture. Hence, it is self-defeating even to consider such bad business practices as a factor.
Even so, it is vital to also point to the fact that to make such strong statements, World Consulting Group has adopted a wide range of procedures that avoid such issues; for instance, at World Consulting Group, there are no two clients from the same industry. It is a fundamental principle in which it has been established that accepting more than one client in the same industry may create an environment that may or may not potentially lead to a conflict of interest. Though it may appear that such actions would limit the profitability and growth potential of World Consulting Group, the decision has been made to protect our clients from even the most remote possibility of conflict of interest. Hence, enabling World Consulting Group clients to eliminate one main concern; this, in turn, may lead to greater trust on both sides.
Additionally, at World Consulting Group, every client is considered vital to the company’s overall success. Many times clients of World Consulting Group are introduced to each other to establish cross-functional business relationships that further strengthen each client’s strategic and competitive advantage and create an inherently positive environment that would allow for utilizing client resources to help each other.
Ultimately, the principle of benefits vs. liability in thriving for customer loyalty is a moot point. At World Consulting Group, it is believed that there are no liabilities in maintaining a professional and mutually beneficial relationship with clients. However, there has to be a set of standard operating procedures to ensure a mutually beneficial relationship.
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