Customer Lifecycle Management best practices

A deep understanding of customer lifecycle management is crucial for businesses to improve their bottom lines. For this, the brand has to prove that they are transparent and ethical in their approach. Besides, implementing Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) best practices & monitoring its KPIs to enhance customer experiences is imperative for a tweaked business strategy.

CLM has come a long way from offline to online. The increasing use of mobiles by a vast population is forcing businesses to adapt themselves to this digital world which has manifested into newer digital-enabled tools and gadgets.

However, retaining the existing customer base is a big challenge for brands. Schemes, offers, and discounts can motivate first-time buyers, but they cannot ensure that customers will stay with the brand over a more extended period. Therefore, the fundamental goal of brands is to guide customers through their journey so that their lifetime value is maximized.

The CLM framework pushes businesses to see the customer journey as a series of processes and meet their demands at every stage.

Best practices for customer lifecycle management 1.   Omnichannel customer support

Staying in touch, catering to every client's query, and supporting them is challenging for a brand. But, too often, brands cannot cater to their client's needs or understand their requirements and keep on interacting with them without knowing their previous engagement history.

If the customers have to repeat their queries at every touchpoint, they will get frustrated & chances are they might move to another brand.

Luckily, as a solution to this, businesses now deliver omnichannel customer services to their clients for a successful customer lifecycle journey. Through this, they communicate with their clients, cater to their queries, provide them consistent support, and deliver high-value customer experiences across all their touchpoints. Their touchpoints could range from voice, email, live chat to in-app support where they can leverage self-service tools.

2.   Customer acquisition strategy

Customers are the backbone of a company. Suppose a brand can convert its fresh leads and onboard them while simultaneously extending the loyalty of the old customers to develop a relationship. In that case, they can easily survive in the competition. However, one of the most significant impending difficulties for a company to create an effective relationship cycle is raising client awareness and interest in their product.

To acquire new customers and build a long-lasting relationship, brands engage in various marketing strategies. For instance, developing interest in new customers by sending emails, contacting through their social media platforms, or direct interaction (if possible) through compelling offers.

Communication helps the brand understand customer requirements, their personas, their interest in the offers, etc. Customer acquisition strategy helps the brands to understand every customer, their unique purpose for the product. Besides, knowing their specific product goals and expectations allows creating an effective customer relationship lifecycle.

3.   Implementing KPIs

To survive in a competitive environment, it is essential to understand customers and their buying patterns & demographic profiles.

For all this understanding, acquiring a rich data source, tabulating it in a prescribed format for easy comparison gives a goldmine of information to the brand to develop their most effective strategy for customer acquisition.

It is imperative to define critical metrics that will serve as KPI (Key performance indicator) that measures the success of a brand's operation. Moreover, it will leverage the acquired information to enhance the customer buying experience with the brand. It is crucial to measure a brand's efforts at various stages of the customer lifecycle journey from reach through acquisition, conversion, and retention to advocacy.

4.   Customer Segmentation

No single marketing strategy works for the customer base as a whole. It should be relevant to customers who may be falling at various stages of the customer lifecycle from awareness, engagement, evaluation, purchase, product experience, and bonding with the brand. It is essential to understand the customer before crafting an effective marketing strategy.

As a prelude to this is the marketing segmentation. Here, customers are segmented based on their demographic profiles, behavioral aspects, geographic location, or the benefits they derive from using the brand's products or services. Such segmentation enables brands to devise an effective strategy to meet customers' requirements and resonates with their aspirations and desires.

Takeaways

A lot can be said about CLM best practices. Best practices make it possible for the brand to deploy ethical means to promote its brand, ensure transparency in its marketing drive, and gain the customers' trust as a reliable brand. These best practices also fine-tune a brand's marketing strategy based on adhering to its KPIs and comparing the input data with standard data.