Customer Life Cycle is a process that describes the stages that the customers pass through. Usually this process begins when the customer starts to be aware of a product/service to become a loyal customer.
Every company that wants its business to grow must manage the customer life cycle. This needs to be done to produce a better customer experience so that companies can earn higher profits.
Before you manage the customer life cycle, it’s better that you first understand about this customer life cycle. Here we provide a complete explanation for you.
What is the Customer Life Cycle?
The customer life cycle is a cycle or process that customers go through when they interact with your company. This cycle consists of 5 main stages, namely:
- Reach
- Acquisition
- Conversion
- Retention
- Loyalty
When companies carry out good customer life cycle management, they could get a complete picture of their customers’ journey and highlight which areas for improvement. Thus, the marketing, sales or service team can design the best strategy that gives customers a pleasant experience at every stage they go through. This will ultimately increase customer satisfaction so they can remain loyal to your company.
Also Read: Mastering the Customer’s Expectation Through CX
Understanding Each Stage in the Customer Life Cycle
1. Reach
The first stage in the customer life cycle is reach. At this stage, potential customers will look for a solution in the form of a product or service that can solve their problem. They will do research such as by comparing various products or reading customer reviews to find the product/service that best suits their needs.
Therefore, companies must be able to carry out various effective marketing strategies to reach their target market. Some of the marketing strategies that can be done are:
- Search engine optimization
- Inbound marketing
- Content marketing, etc.
2. Acquisition
After customers are aware of the products/services you offer, they will visit your company’s website or contact your customer service team. At this stage, the customer has entered the second stage, namely acquisition.
As a company that provides services/products, you must be able to handle customers very well and get them to be interested in making a purchase. If customers make a contact through telephone, then the CS team must respond properly to their questions. The CS team can also dig more deeply for more information from the customers so they can offer the most suitable product/service to meet the customers’ needs. Therefore, it is important for companies to provide a professional CS (inbound) team that is able to serve customers well.
3. Conversion
After customers get the explanation from the marketing team/CS team and are convinced to choose your services/products, then they would make the purchases. This stage is known as the conversion stage.
At this stage the companies must be able to ensure that the purchasing process can run smoothly. This needs to be done to create a good customer experience to keep them returning back to make purchases.
So, to provide a smooth purchasing process, companies can do various things. Some of these include providing a simple purchasing procedure, offering a variety of payment options, providing clear product and price info, and so on.
In addition, companies can also take advantage of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system that is capable of recording, reporting and analyzing various data about customers. This valuable data can be used for better marketing strategies in the future as well as to improve customer experience.
4. Retention
After the first purchase is made, the customer will continue to the next stage in the cycle, namely retention. Here, the companies’ focus is on maintaining relationships with customers on an ongoing basis. To make this happen, companies need to maintain their engagement with customers. Several strategies that can be implemented include providing CS (inbound) services that are ready to help 24/7, providing product discounts/promos, asking for feedback, and maintaining interaction with customers through various platforms including email.
5. Loyalty
The final stage in the customer life cycle is loyalty where customers have become loyal to your company. At this stage, customers will not only buy your products/services repeatedly, but will also promote them to others.
You need to know that it takes a lot of time and effort for a customer to get to this stage. Therefore, companies must be able to maintain their loyal customers as well as possible. One example of a strategy that you can do is to offer a loyalty program that can encourage customers to keep coming back to your company.
Also Read: What has Changed Forever in the CX World?
Tips for Managing the Customer Life Cycle
In order for customer life cycle management to provide good results, there are several things you can do as follows.
- Identify your target market. This will help you to provide relevant content to reach the right market.
- Provide self-service resources where customers can independently discover the information they need about your services/products.
- Provide proactive customer service to reach your target market.
- Make sure the buying procedure is simple and easy.
- Provide assistance options during purchasing decisions, such as by providing an AI chatbot system.
- Make the customer feel cared for post-purchase, such as by using an automated email system that can send a thank you message when the customer completes a purchase.
- Take advantage of DEOS‘ comprehensive Customer Experience services to facilitate the customer life cycle management process more practically!
Best Practices for Improving Customer Experience in Every Customer Life Cycle
If you want your business to continue to grow, companies need to manage each stage of the customer life cycle to produce a good customer experience. Thus, your company can generate more profits.
DEOS offers comprehensive services to improve the customer experience in your company. We have a variety of solutions that you can use to optimize every stage of the customer life cycle your target market goes through.
Please contact us or click DEOS Customer Experience Management Services to get further explanation.