MBA1304 How to Improve Customer Retention Quickly

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey O welcome to the $100 MBA. Show the solutions you're looking for for your business every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar MBA A a complete business training and community online and in today's lesson you will learn how to improve your customer retention quickly. You work super hard to attract potential customers, convert them into customers. You spend time, you spend money and that's why it's so heartbreaking when they leave you. Whether you have a SaaS business, a software as a service business where you have reoccurring payments, where you charge your customers in a reoccurring fashion, or you have a service where you have clients that come back to you for services. Retaining your customers is essential. It's essential for you having longevity as a business if you can keep your customers happy and keep them customers even if you have slow growth, your business will grow because your existing customers are still paying you month over month or whatever period they're getting charged, you're getting in new customers that are staying on and you're building upon solid ground. But what do you do if your retention is lousy and most of us have this fight or flight reflex we're like, we gotta do something now. We gotta change this. So in today's, Today's lesson, I'm going to share with you one way to quickly improve your retention as fast as possible. I've learned this through experience and I want to share it with you. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When you retain your customers, you have a higher potential to grow in the long run. Not only are you keeping your business, but if they're happy, you can get more business out of them through reselling, through expansion revenue, giving them other products or services that they can use. The issue is if they're not happy, they're either going to begrudgingly use your service and not be willing to buy anything else, or worse, leave you. And a low retention rate is like death by a thousand stab wounds, right? It's like small little pricks of a knife that really drain your business. So in today's lesson, I want to share with you one quick action item you could do to improve your retention. Often we get overwhelmed when we think about retention. How do we keep our customers? How do we make them happy? And we think there's a million things we can do, and there's actually a lot of things you probably can do to improve your retention. But we want to improve it as quickly as possible, so we can't do them all. So what we're going to do is that we're going to focus on the number one thing that's causing your customers to leave. You need to discover this. You want to do some quick research and find out why people are leaving you. One quick way to do this is to look at all your canceled customers, people that have left you, people that are no longer your customers, and review their customer service tickets, their emails or correspondence, their chats, and find out what they were upset about, what they were not happy about. This is kind of like the rough way to do this, but it's doable. You could spend a couple hours and make this happen and see some patterns and maybe do some tallying. Like we got five people complaining about this and one person complaining about that. And you're really trying to narrow down what's the biggest complaint, what's the biggest reason why they're leaving? Whether it's the speed of your service, the quality of your service, some aspect they're looking for that's not there. You need to pinpoint it. The best way to do this is if you have an exit survey. If you have exit surveys, meaning that when people cancel your subscription, when they are no longer a customer, that you send them out a survey or some people actually require in their software, in their product before they cancel. They give reasons why they're canceling and then the cancellation goes through. This is ideal because then you can just go one source, find out why people are leaving, and focus on that number one thing. Remember, we're looking at the most frequent answer, the most popular reason why people are leaving. And sometimes it's not really anything to do with your product, but it has to do how you onboard the customer. Like, for example, some people say, I didn't get a chance to use it, I didn't get engaged. And in that case, you need to worry about how you can get your customers using your product, using your service as fast as possible, as frequently as possible. So maybe you need an onboarding activation process to tackle this number one threat and you got to see this as a threat. So once you've done your research, once you've looked at all the information you have in front of you and you know, hey, there's a lot of things that people are not happy about, or, you know, a lot of things that people are leaving us for. But this is the number one thing. Even if it's by a small margin, this is the number one thing. You make it the focus of your business for the next week or two, depending how big this fix is going to be, to obliterate this reason, to solve this problem solving. Sometimes it's an easy fix. Sometimes it's as simple as offering more guidance, more tutorials. Sometimes there's something confusing about your product that you aren't aware of. And it's a small tweak you have to make, but sometimes it's a little bit bigger. And sometimes you're going to have to actually change your product to make it better. And it may take more time, but you need to focus and get it done. Why? Because that small change is going to make a great effect on your retention. That one thing you're gonna work on, even if it means, you know, taking your foot off the gas a little bit on marketing and focusing on this one thing that you need to fix, it's gonna save you more money, it's gonna make you more money because less people are gonna leave. They're gonna be happy, they're gonna enjoy your product, they're gonna spread the word, they're gonna do the marketing for you via word of mouth. And by focusing on one thing, you don't get overwhelmed by all the other things. Now, you did the research, you know what the other things are. You know, you have the number one thing and then the things after that, the ones that are kind of runner ups. And that's fine, you can work on those other things later. But right now, just work on the number one thing so you can have the greatest effect on and retaining your customers. Too many of us get overwhelmed and try to do it all, try to fix all the problems, and that's not doable. You need to focus on one thing because you got to run your business. Other things you got to do. Once you solve one, then you can work on the next. Take it step by step. Now, once you know what you have to fix, change in your business to retain more customers. A lot of us rush to say, hey, let's go and fix this, let's do this, let's change this. Take a little time, a minute to consider, why are you changing it? How will you change it? Because sometimes in our rush, in our haste, we don't actually fix the problem. We make it worse or we make assumptions we shouldn't make. So my advice is to reach out to the customers that were in that pool that left because of this reason you're going to fix. Reach out to them. Ask if you can jump on a phone call, on a video call, something most people are more than happy to give their advice, give their opinion, give their feedback. They're actually flattered at the fact that you're actually reaching out to them and that you care about what they think, whether they are a user or no longer a user. You'll be surprised. Even if you get to speak to only a handful of people, three, four, five people, it's useful because you can just hear from them, hey, I see that you canceled because of reason X. We're actually going to work on fixing this thing. But before we do, we want to learn what were your frustrations? What you didn't like about this thing? What were you trying to accomplish? What would you like to see? That kind of thing? This helps you have a game plan, understand how to attack this problem. Because you may be making some assumptions that are incorrect. And this is a big problem in business when we try to make assumptions for our customers. Why assume? Just talk to them, ask them. They'll say, hey, you know what? This was annoying, actually. I hit this roadblock. It wasn't clear to me how to do this. X. I didn't find this useful. Whatever it is, your job is to listen and get some information. Try not to talk, try not to talk, minimal talk Ask, you know, as short as possible questions. Tell me more about that. Can you elaborate on that? How is that frustrating? Things like that. So you can be able to get as much information, take as many notes as you can, and then take it to your team. Or you might be doing this change with all this information. This is gold, absolute gold. And it's going to help you really nail the solution and really change your retention rates to the positive. Right? It's really going to help you big time because you know now how to keep your customers happy in this area. Yes, we're going to do the same thing with the other things that we have on the list. But right now we're focusing again on one big thing that's gonna make the most effect.

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The February 2025 Nielsen report. Guys, to wrap up today's lesson, if there's one word I had to emphasize to fix your retention is focus. It's so easy to be like, hey, I gotta fix a billion things. There's a billion things wrong. That's why people are leaving me. Focus on the biggest thing so you can make the biggest effect so you can actually fix that problem. Do it right. Spend the time to learn from your customers, hear from them and make the change as needed. You'll start to see your retention improve after you do that, and you'll be encouraged to move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you don't miss the next episode. By hitting subscribe on whatever you use to listen to podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Tunein, Apple podcasts, you make sure that when the next episode is available, it's available on your device immediately. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. It could be disheartening seeing customers leave your business and in this process you might feel like, oh man, I can't believe I'm disappointing all these people. This is horrible and it might get you down, but you need to pick yourself up and say, hey, you're fixing the problem, you're improving things and you're doing what you need to do. Speak to your customers to turn things around. It's easy to kind of just not open that page, not look at the problem, but by facing it head on and slowly focusing on the things that will make the most effect, you're on the path. You're on the way to becoming a great business. Keep your eye on the prize, on the finish line, and it'll get you through it. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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