Hi AN,
I noticed that no one has replied yet, so I will throw in my two pennies worth and get things rolling :-)
Before initiating a customer retention operation, it's important to have a good understanding of your customers. In particular, which demographic is the most profitable to you and which ones are the least profitable to you. Most companies will chart this along two axis and create a quadrant against spend versus effort to service. Although there are many other permutations that potentially are involved, this forms the backbone of many companies and how they identify customer value.
Once this is established, and a metric applied to your customer base, you can then consider the approach for a retention strategy, including learning about which customers are defecting and why. Customers will always churn... its the nature of the beast. the key is understanding the reasons why they are churning. Admittedly, learning why they leave can begin in parallel with your customer value model, so that you can start gathering intelligence.
The retention model should achieve the following:
1/ Understand the root causes of the customer leaving (and these should be categorised during strategy development)
2/ Assess the value of the customer to your business
3/ Prepare to offer the customer an incentive to remain, based on the value of the customer
This overall approach aims to allow your business to retain your most profitable customers while allowing your low value customers to leave (as they would theoretically be offered a smaller incentive to remain).
In terms of skill sets, I would compare the customer retention skill set to one of a complaints management. They need to be empathetic, with good communication skills to help disarm unhappy customers and to aim to work cooperatively to resolve the issue (the issue being they want to leave).
That's about it for now. Let me know what you think of this and if I can be of any further help.
Kind regards
Gene
