From sales and marketing to increased technical support, acquiring new hosted VoIP customers comes at a cost. That’s why, as you grow your business, there’s little more important than improving customer retention and driving down your churn rate.
Many of our most successful VoIP resellers strike a careful balance between generating new leads and taking good care of the customers they already have. As a result, they keep their existing accounts – and recurring revenue – for longer.
Read on for a few essential tips on decreasing your churn as a VoIP reseller – and to find out why customer retention shouldn’t always be your priority.
Deliver exceptional value in your VoIP services
The most obvious strategy for lowering your churn rate is giving your customers the best possible VoIP service. It’s not enough to deliver VoIP that works – you need a fully-featured, high-quality service that becomes an integral part of operations. In short, you need to become the supplier of a service that your customers can’t live without.
If you’re still comparing hosted telephony providers, it can be hard to gauge what your service will actually be like. Every provider promises the world, but there are numerous things you will only discover once you’re up-and-running, from regular downtime to technical support that loses interest once new customers are on-board.
Whether you choose Hostcomm or not, look for a partner with a proven track-record in managing and selling VoIP. Ample experience, high customer satisfaction levels and a privately-owned network infrastructure are all signs that you will be able to provide a service your customers want to keep hold of.
Predict cancellations and take proactive action
There’s nothing worse than a service provider that suddenly becomes interested when a customer says they are planning to cancel. If you wait until then, your attempts to retain a customer will be hurried, haphazard, and probably expensive. Instead, use the information you have to make informed decisions and get ahead of potential cancellations.
Downtime is just one example. If a customer has recently lost half a day of communications because their hosted telephony went down, it’s a fair assumption that they could be considering another provider. Offering a discount or goodwill gesture could be the difference between continuing a positive relationship and receiving notice at the end of the month.
Of course, most of the ways you can course-correct a potential cancellation will come at a cost. However, according to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer costs anywhere from five to 25 times more than keeping hold of one. A small cost now could avoid a huge cost in the future.
Don’t retain customers at any cost
Finally, it’s worth remembering that keeping a low churn rate is important – but not the most important thing of all. Your VoIP reseller profitability should always be a consideration when you make a customer retention decision.
Businesses lose customers – that’s just part of doing business – and, as researchers Sunil Gupta and Aurélie Lemmens explain on Forbes, it’s important that your retention activities reflect the value of the individual customer.
If your VoIP reseller plan includes effective reporting through your reseller dashboard, you’ll be able to use customer revenue as the foundation of every decision you make about incentives or promotions designed to reduce churn.
Sell trusted VoIP services that customers stick with long-term. Find out more at https://www.hostcomm.co.uk/resellers.
And take a look at our Affilliates programme for exciting rewards for referring new clients.
