How to use automated workflows to improve customer loyalty and retention

Introduction: The benefit of customer retention

Every business aspires to retain all the customers it acquires. The reason is simple. It's far more profitable to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one. There's also the compounding effect. A happy long-term customer is likely to talk to more people about your brand, and thus bring in more customers through referrals. A Bain and Company report titled, Prescription for Cutting Costs, stated that a meager 5% increase in customer retention can boost a company's revenue by 25% or more. This study was focused on customers in the financial sector, but we can safely extrapolate this to customers in the other B2B business sectors as well.

Businesses leverage several strategies, tools, and techniques to retain customers. Workflow automation is one of the tools that can help you keep customers happy and loyal to your brand. We'll explain how using a few workflow automation examples.

Deploy surveys at high-impact touchpoints to measure customer happiness

Throughout a customer's journey with your brand, there are key moments that can capture valuable customer feedback. For example, you can deploy a survey right after onboarding to capture customers' feedback about their onboarding experience; likewise, you could collect feedback after a purchase or a support interaction. This helps you identify customer dissatisfaction early on and improve customer experience continuously.

In the screenshot above, a hypothetical IT software company sends out a product feedback request to all customers six months after their purchase. The aim is to capture customer feedback about the product early on to understand product usage and identify areas where customers are struggling to use the company's software. This helps troubleshoot issues well before they arise, improving product stickiness, and ensuring customers remain happy and continue their journey with your brand.

Scan intent data to detect early signs of customer churn

When a customer churns, it's often not usually because of one bad experience with onboarding, inability to access or get helpful resolutions from the support team, or pricing-related concerns. Churn usually builds up over months of bad experiences, resentment, and dissatisfaction.

Regular churn, due to seasonal factors, can also mask real customer churn; this makes it impossible for brands to narrow down real reasons for churn. The ability to track churn signals can be game-changing for brands. Turns out, AI along with automation can help you do that and improve retention. AI systems can scan for behavioral shifts, financial signals, and support friction, and update the health score or churn score in real time based on the signals captured. Automation ensures that a notification goes out to sales representatives as soon as these scores change.

AI-led workflows can be used to flag warning signals such as:

• Drop in product usage
• Edition downgrades
• Missed renewal schedules
• Inactivity for 7-days or more
• Negative feedback and friction with support representatives
• Declining sentiment expressed by NPS surveys or CSAT scores

Taking this a step forward, AI agents can proactively scan conversations for technical hiccups and send out support documents or solutions that customers can read through and troubleshoot their issues themselves. As soon as the customer resolves his issues and responds affirmatively, the AI agent can update the health score and notify the sales representative.

Take each customer through a personalized journey based on behavior data

Netflix and Spotify serve a masterclass in how to personalize a customer's journey throughout their lifecycle. By advocating hyper-personalized programs and music that customers want, these brands have successfully capitalized on customer retention as a growth strategy.

By creating hyper-personalized engagements using granular inputs about customers' locations, preferences, purchase history, demographics, browsing history, and even the best time and preferred channel of contact, brands can build a sense of trust and kinship with their customers. As such, customers stay with the brand longer, retention goes up, and revenue predictability improves.

The first step in taking customers through a personalized journey involves creating customer segments based on their stage in the customer journey and shared interests. For example, you can create segments for first-time buyers, subscription holders, cart abandoners, seasonal shoppers, churn risk customers, discount-driven shoppers, brand advocates, and more.

The second step is to define a strategy to prompt customers in each segment to complete a transaction or complete any predefined activity.

The screenshot above shows a workflow for engaged non-buyers for a hypothetical company selling beauty products. This encompasses customers who are active on the mobile application regularly but have never purchased an item. These customers are segmented using the touchpoint score and visitor score. The workflow automatically sends out an email to these customers offering a free sample. To ensure this free sample policy doesn't get abused, the brand has put in a clause that limits recipients to those who signed up in the current financial quarter.

Build better cross-team coordination so customers get a unified experience across your brand

Let's say you purchase an air conditioning unit from a company particularly because they promise on-site delivery and installation. You get the air conditioner delivered to your residence but the assembly takes forever, and when the technician finally arrives separately, it turns out they brought the wrong parts required for installation.

Customers often get frustrated with a brand, not for the quality of the products purchased, but for the lack of streamlined service across the brand. When sales, onboarding, and support are not aligned and the customer has to repeat himself to onboarding or support, the frustration mounts. Gaps in the hand-off process make the experience feel disjointed and frustrating. Automation solves this by ensuring customer data is passed to the teams that handle downstream processes, and receives updates automatically anytime there's a change in the customer journey.

The screenshot above shows a sample workflow of what happens when a customer purchases an air conditioner. As soon as the deal is marked "closed won," a record is created in the customer onboarding module and the deal details are populated. An installation schedule is also set up one day after deal closure, giving sufficient time for the delivery team to complete the delivery.

Consistent, co-ordinated efforts from sales, onboarding, and support reduces response delays and creates a seamless experience for customers that makes them more likely to stay with a brand longer.

Speed up service delivery timelines, particularly for high-value customers

Several brands across the globe are notorious for delivering poor service despite offering a great range of products. Terrible customer experiences can stem from several factors like poor service quality, missed delivery timelines, high service costs, long wait times, ineffective hand-offs among service teams, miscommunication, and a lack of timely service updates.

Faster resolutions directly improve customer satisfaction. Customers feel valued when problems are addressed quickly and efficiently. Automation can help in several stages during the service process.

• Route tickets automatically to the right agent by matching technician skill set against the problem reported.
• Escalate tickets from high-value clients, particularly if they're waiting in the service queue for long.
• Automatically escalate unresolved issues to senior technicians or service managers.
• Notify inventory management teams well in advance when parts are running low or automate parts ordering when stocks run dry.
• Send out automated updates to keep customers in the loop when service is delayed, or when the estimated cost of service goes up unexpectedly.
• Alert technicians and their supervisors when SLAs are about to be breached.
• Notify the technicians involved when tickets transition from one service group to another.

You can set up most of these workflows through your help desk application and track the updates in your CRM by setting up the integration between your CRM and Desk. Zoho CRM's signals notify reps every time their contacts raise a support ticket, respond to a ticket, or leave a happiness rating. This helps the sales team escalate tickets from high-value clients and zero in on the right time to approach clients for cross-sell or up-sell activities.

Earn customer loyalty through reliable customer interactions

Your sales team is steadily winning customers; the support team is working to make sure technical glitches are resolved as soon as they arise; your customer success team is making sure customers' post-purchase journey is smooth. You're doing everything right and by the book. Does this automatically gain you customer loyalty?

Customer loyalty is earned through several intrinsic factors over the course of a customer's journey. Look at Lexus, the luxury vehicle division of Toyota. Amidst other luxury car makers, Lexus stands out for its customer centricity. The staff at Lexus always keeps an eye out for Lexus vehicles on the road, and anytime they notice a Lexus car with a broken tail light or a dented fender, they get in touch with the owner, and proactively get the parts replaced or fixed, free of charge. In fact, Lexus once famously flew a stranded family to their destination in a helicopter when their Lexus broke down in the middle of the French Alps. Such a level of extended relationship building is the key to lasting business success.

Personalizing marketing content and sending out personalized recommendations helps keep customers coming back. But what keeps them loyal is when brands deliver consistent service, and are predictable and reliable towards customers' needs. Automation helps create consistency at scale, even as customer volume grows.

A process that works smoothly for 100 customers becomes chaotic when customer count hits 10,000. Automation ensures that service quality remains stable during growth, customers receive timely communication, teams work together cohesively on customer issues, support operations are organized, and engagement remains proactive. Reliability grows trust, and this trust drives customer loyalty.

Conclusion

Workflow automation ensures customers receive consistent quality support, communications, and services from your brand pre- and post-purchase. AI combined with automation keeps interactions with customers consistent and repeatable, so every customer feels supported and valued. The biggest advantage of AI isn't actually efficiency, it's continuity. It's easier for brands to deliver one stellar experience; automation ensures that customers get stellar experiences throughout their customers' journeys and not sporadically. It ensures that customers don't feel lost or forgotten in between touchpoints. That is where workflow automation truly helps brands win and retain customers.