When a fast growing company finds the best way to create a repeatable sales process for their product, it’s important for the customer success team to find the right balance between keeping existing customers 100% satisfied while also following through on new client implementations.

In our case at QGenda, we provide automated on-call physician scheduling software with unique complex business rules for each customer and below are some of the customer retention methods that work well for us:

•  We are always ready to help an existing customer and everyone in the company (management, sales, engineers, and developers) make existing customers the highest priority.
• Hire personable engineers (we look for industrial engineers with a strong academic record) from top schools like Georgia Tech, Vanderbilt, Purdue, and many other excellent Universities.
• Each customer has a minimum of one dedicated engineer and one backup engineer who remain with that customer from implementation to go-live through their first year renewal as the main point of contact. Customers prefer this type of personal continuity and enjoy working with the same dedicated engineers each time they call with questions.
• Quarterly customer check-ins by sales and engineering (have them switch off and rotate quarters) because sometimes the customer feels more comfortable telling a sales person their issues.
• We are big believers in the saying “…teach a person to fish and they will eat for a lifetime”, but sometimes customers (despite having the ability themselves) would rather us do the fishing for them. So essentially that means we always go the extra distance to wow the customer by not only providing them great software (the “fishing rod”), but also offer to do their part and run the software for them at no additional cost (aka we fish for them).

These are just some of the many ways we strive to exceed customer expectations and be the best place to be a customer.

What are some additional thoughts and ideas on customer retention?

Twitter: @Benoit_Greg