Customer Retention Management – Honing Your Skill Sets

By David Lazear

Creating a customer retention management system is critical to the success and growth of your business. Central to this system is the development of a number of skill sets which must be “in place” to make sure your system is completely on target. It must be a priority to get the necessary skills training for yourself and to provide it for your business partners

Use the following survey to gauge your customer retention management and the skills needed for establishing effective and long-term retention of your customers, leads, and business partners.

Place a mark by each item you feel is “in place” in your customer retention management. [Please Note: throughout this article I will use the term “customer” to refer to customers, leads, prospects, business partners, and team members.]

Customer Retention Management: Foundational Skills

The foundational skills represent the bottom line skills necessary to establish basic human relationships and to create an effective interchange with your customers, leads, and business partners.

Without these skills chances of providing a great customer experience are dim. All other customer retention skills are built on this solid interpersonal foundation.


Maintaining appropriate eye contact with the customer in face-to-face contacts

Using the customer’s name

Waiting till the customer is finished speaking before offering a response

Deep listening to the customer’s concerns or questions

Making sure the customer has plenty of time and opportunity to speak

Expressing acceptance and appreciation to the customer for being a customer

Maintaining an open mind in all dealings with customers

Respecting customers’ opinions

Customer Retention Management: Functioning Skills

These are the skills needed to manage communication with your customers, leads, and business team. The importance of the functioning skills is that they draw the customer into a meaningful dialogue where you then have the opportunity to discover what they really need and how you can be of the greatest assistance to them.

Praising or affirming the customer

Keeping conversations with customers focused

Offering help to the customer

Encouraging customers to fully express their concerns

Sharing important information about the company or organization, product or service with customers

Using positive body language in face-to-face customer encounters

Using positive voice tones, pitch, rhythms, timbre, and inflection when talking with customers

“Mirroring” and “matching” a customer

Encouraging customers to express their feelings

Customer Retention Management: Formulating Skills

These are the skills needed to build deeper understandings between customers, leads, and business partners and yourself, the company you represent, your organization, product, or service.

All customer retention strategies are about building long-term relationships; however, the formulating skills are the main tools for insuring that this happens. They are about building trust between your customers and you and your organization.

Checking for the customer’s understanding

Encouraging and supporting the customer

Asking for clarification or more information when needed

Energizing customers

Inviting the customer to offer his or her opinions on a product or service

Summarizing or paraphrasing what a customer has said to make sure you’ve “gotten it right”

Empathy with a customer’s point of view and feelings

Customer Retention Management: Fermenting Skills

These are the skills needed to “think outside the box”, to resolve disagreements or conflicts, to search for more information or different solutions, or to communicate rationales behind different aspects of your business system, how it works, and how to align oneself with it.

The application of the fermenting skills often results in new ideas for improving a product or service, and even ideas about totally new products or services that would help customers. At this level you and the customer almost become co-partners.


Correcting a customer’s misperception without putting them down

Explaining or clarifying business procedures and practices in open, non-defensive ways

Asking for elaboration of customer concerns when more information is needed

Asking questions to gain a deeper understanding of customers’ concerns

Offering a range of alternative solutions to create customer satisfaction

Elaboration on customers’ insights

Creating a consensus when dealing with customers

Integrating and synthesizing discussion points

Staying in touch with customers to gain ongoing feedback

Now you’re probably thinking, a lot of this is pretty obvious. However, how often have you experienced other’s lack of skill in doing the obvious? And, how often have you, unwittingly, failed to practice the skill sets above?

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, these skills must be central to your customer retention management program. You want them to become almost second nature. There is no better resource that I have found for getting systematic skills coaching and training than Renegade University. I highly recommend that you check this out today!

To help you further in "honing your skills", watch this space over the next several weeks for a series of very practical “skill-building exercises” to help you with your customer retention management.

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About the author:

David Lazear is a mentor and coach for mentors, coaches, and trainers. He is an associate of Mike Klingler and Ann Sieg at the Renegade University and Renegade Professional.

David has written some 15 books and created numerous resources for home business entrepreneurs, coaches, and trainers. His expertise is training others how to assess and address other’s “learning profile” using the research on “multiple intelligences” (a.k.a. The 8 Kinds of Smart).

David Lazear teaches how to turbo-charge any mentoring, coaching, and training you provide so you Reach Everyone, Everytime – Guaranteed!