Customer Retention: Scaling a loyal client base through tech

Many small businesses grow because they’re able to provide customers personalized service and an outsized amount of attention. This is great, until they get stuck. Your customers love working with you, but there is only so much of “you” to go around.

You may believe the level of personalized service your current customers have grown accustomed to is something they’ll always require, but we’ve found in most cases, this is untrue.

Today’s CNC and AM customers value speed and consistency of service over personal relationships.

Your goal should be to reduce the friction in every customer interaction, and automating service is essential for getting there.

This hardly means you’ll lose touch with customer needs and demands as you scale your business. In fact, you’ll have more customer info and data at-the-ready than ever before.

The basics

1. Customer accounts

The first and most obvious step for enabling your customers to place repeat orders is allowing them to create a customer account with your shop. With a username and password-protected account, they can save their shipping address, billing and payment info, as well as keep an order history with your shop. This means customers can repurchase a previous order within seconds because the model, materials and other specifications are saved. And it makes checking out a net-new order a breeze because they don’t have to reenter basic contact and payment info.

2. Customer communication

We all receive transactional business emails and often ignore them, but they are still essential: They provide confirmation of a successful payment, as well as transparency on shipping and tracking info. When a customer doesn’t receive these emails, you will likely hear about it, so an automated system to ensure the deployment of these emails in a timely manner is a cornerstone of customer communication.

3. Customer satisfaction

Aside from basic confirmation and tracking emails, another way to increase customer retention is do a QA follow-up shortly after their order has shipped. This can be as simple as letting them know how to contact you if they have any questions regarding their last order, or asking them to complete a survey about their experience. Even if customers don’t engage with these emails, they’ll know you care enough to ask. And if they do respond, you’ll have more information to serve your customers even better in the future.

Above and beyond

Tools like DigiFabster’s e-commerce platform can also be programmed to follow up with customers before they’ve made their purchase. Say the customer creates an account, uploads a model, gets a quote, but doesn’t complete their purchase. You can opt to send them a gentle nudge (or a few) directing them to their abandoned shopping cart.

Over time, if there’s a trend of abandoned shopping carts from credible leads, DigiFabster’s lead conversion tools can give you recommendations such as price tweaking or another type of follow-up communication.

Front-to-back office operations

Picture this: you have your online shop running with the e-commerce widget, you’re generating lightning-fast quotes for your customers, they’re serving themselves with self-checkout, and all your email communication is running smoothly. You’re now accumulating customer data that can be leveraged by your back-office CRM, ERP, Bookkeeping and Analytics tools. With DigiFabster, you get a powerful API that connects seamlessly to software such as SalesForce, Quickbooks Desktop, Xero, JobBOSS, Shoptech, and more. This not only saves you an enormous amount of time on manual data entry, but also provides you enhanced reporting to help you make high-level business decisions.

On an individual level, DigiFabster can receive and sync info such as packing lists and delivery info from your back office to keep your customers apprised.

Building your full-growth future

By improving the user experience on your site, enabling automated quotes and self-checkout features, you’re bound to make your current customers happier than ever to keep coming back.

This article is an excerpt from our guidebook: Customer Experience Drives Customer Acquisition: How to optimize it online for your CNC machine shop