How Do You Take Care of Past Customers? What Are the Special Benefits?

Vu Khoi

Author at Wotech Electronics Blog

In reality, many businesses spend enormous budgets and resources on finding and attracting new customers. Yet they fail to realize that past customers are the truly important factor in a business's success. So who is this audience, and what are the steps to take care of them effectively? Join SimERP to find out in the article below.

What Are Past Customers?

Past customers are customers who have bought and experienced the products and services you provide. One obvious truth: customers only really become "past" customers when your product, service, or customer service isn't compelling enough to keep them. Understanding the needs and feedback of past customers is highly meaningful to a business's operations.

The Benefits of Taking Care of Past Customers

In the Industry 4.0 era, beyond the greatest benefit — businesses applying technological advances to their operations to increase productivity and cut costs effectively — there are still difficulties they must face. One of these is fierce competition in the market, and the fiercest battle of all is attracting potential customers and retaining past ones.

It's no accident that taking care of past customers is increasingly valued by businesses and made a top priority. So what benefits does this activity bring?

Reducing Business Operating Costs

Research shows that the cost of acquiring new customers can be 6–7 times the cost of caring for past ones. Meanwhile, 80% of a business's revenue comes from this customer base. From the figures above, it's easy to see that improving the quality of past-customer care helps the business cut spending on ineffective product and service promotion, contributing to better business results.

Increasing Sales Revenue

The most visible benefit for a business is rising sales revenue. According to one study, when the customer retention rate rises by 5%, the business's profit increases by 25–95%.

This revenue comes from two directions:

• The return of past customers: When your customer service is good, customers tend to trust you and feel more comfortable spending money to use the business's products and services.

• Past customers referring new customers: when the business has built trust and goodwill with them, past customers will usually recommend the business's products and services to friends, family, and colleagues, or through reviews on social networks, and so on.

Strengthening Relationships with Current Customers

Improving the quality of past-customer care is one of the best ways to get an overview of the business's current customer service.

By listening to and addressing feedback from past customers, the business can easily spot gaps in its current customer service. From there, it can plan improvements and new acquisition strategies to increase the customer retention rate.

Increasing Competitiveness

Past customers no longer using your products or services may mean they have switched to competitors. Caring for past customers helps you answer the question "why?"

Through this, the business can learn more about competitors' products and services that outperform yours. Understanding competitors' current strategies and operations, along with your own competitive advantages, will help you make the right decisions and tactics to improve the quality of your products and services...

How Do You Take Care of Past Customers?

Given the special importance and benefits of caring for past customers, businesses naturally ask themselves: how do we get past customers to come back?

Customer retention is not just a short-term activity but requires a continuous process throughout the business's operations to achieve the best results. Below, SimERP proposes the steps to take care of past customers effectively.

Find Out Why Customers Stopped Using Your Products or Services

The biggest anxiety in customer care is customers no longer using the business's products or services. There must be some reason customers stop interacting with the brand, and finding out that reason clearly is the important first step.

Surveying past customers' feedback about products and services can be done through direct phone calls, online survey forms, or friendly messages via the platforms customers use to communicate with the business (social networks, website, mobile app, and so on). Once the cause has been identified, the business can take corrective measures on the product or improve service quality to enhance the user experience more effectively.

Offer Incentives

Beyond apologies and promises from the business, past customers will more readily accept concrete actions. So offer them promotional programs, discounts, personalized services, or other interesting activities that competitors cannot provide.

To do this, the business needs to understand competitors' strategies well and have an effective long-term competitive strategy. Depending on the business's situation and operating goals, propose the most unique and creative incentives to build loyal customers effectively.

Remind Customers About Your Products and Services

Customers not coming back to interact with the brand may be because your products and services didn't leave much of an impression on them. So reaching the right platforms customers are using and notifying, reminding them about the business's products and services is the best way to keep past customers from drifting into forgetfulness.

The platforms your customers use may include social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and so on), YouTube, websites, mobile apps, and more. Identifying the right potential platforms and expanding connections is an effective way to attract new customers and remind past ones. Through creative advertising, sending notifications, messaging, and posting unique content on these platforms regularly and with a concrete plan, you can make a lasting impression on past customers about your products and services.

Focus on Customer Service

As the direct bridge between customers and the business, setting out engaging strategies that increase the customer experience will deliver better results. To do this, beyond creativity and professionalism in crafting acquisition strategies, a team needs full customer care skills: constantly listening and understanding. From there, the business can gauge customer satisfaction to develop effective solutions that further improve the customer experience.

Apply CRM Software to Reconnect with Past Customers

We understand that to care for past customers, we need to clearly understand why they left, build plans and proposals, and remind them about the incentive programs the business currently has. But how can Sales and Marketing control the pace, volume, and quality of these activities? Today, many businesses in Vietnam have adopted CRM software (a customer relationship management platform) to gain deep insight into customer information and from there deploy appropriate care activities for each group — Getfly, CRMViet, SimCRM, or for large enterprises, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and Oracle CRM. These are the leading CRM software tools favored by many companies.

Create an Effective Work Environment

Advising customers and building their goodwill is never easy work, when their needs are always changing and they react differently to each product and service. A word of encouragement, a reward commensurate with the effort employees put into building customer loyalty, is extremely important. This gives employees more motivation in their work, spreads a spirit of striving and competition, and creates a dynamic, effective work environment.

Conclusion

With the benefits that caring for past customers brings, the importance of this activity and of applying IT to a business's success cannot be denied. From the points shared above, SimERP hopes you will choose a past-customer care strategy that fits your business's situation and goals.

If you'd like to TRY SimCRM SOFTWARE FREE FOR 30 DAYS, leave your registration information here!

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