Client Retention

Background

The relationship between client and business is one founded on transparency and delivery. To maintain that relationship, those ideals need to be steadfastly upheld. Our company faced a continuous challenge with retention of clients. The Research Team was employed to discover the root causes for these issues and propose solutions for the future.

Objective

Determine root causes of reductions in client retention and identify possible solutions areas to retain clients for future advertising campaigns.

Hypothesis (a): Clients that receive timely and insightful reporting have a higher retention rate.

    • Clients

    • Operations

    • Marketing Science

    • UX

    • Product

    • Marketing Science

    • Insights Analytics

    • Operations

    • Leadership

    • Sales

Something Interesting

Repeat clients are typically considered 67% more valuable than one-time clients.  43% of our clients do not renew. 

Method

For this project, the Research Team focused on presenting a strategic plan for keeping clients through a series of discovery exercises and needs analyses.

Procedure: Discovery

To effectively dive into understand our client retention issues, the Research Team sought to compile the multitude of research touchpoints to develop a complete story of client needs and pain points. By triangulating needs and pain points surfaced in sales data and continuous Client Satisfaction surveys, the Research Team was able to develop a roster and interview questionnaire. To avoid issues of response bias, this roster and questionnaire were taken by a partner firm to do user interviews which were reported back to the Research Team.

In a parallel effort, the Research Team conducted task analyses with Sales and Operations Teams to identify assets being delivered and understand workflows to identify issues in setup and delivery.

Methods:

  • Client Satisfaction Surveys

  • CRM Data Analysis

  • User Interviews (partner)

  • Asset Inventory

  • Needs Analysis

  • Glossary Creation

Asset Inventory

User Interviews

Procedure: Generative

With the phased approach and an understanding that clients were leaving due to a lack of reporting and transparency, the UX Team and Product sought to make short-term improvements to the current dashboard reporting while planning for an enhanced reporting flow for the future.

Methods:

  • Interaction Design Wireframing/Wireflowing

Wireframe Design

Results & Discussion

As the project evolved, it was determined that the main culprit of client retention issues was a lack of transparency and reporting available to the client.  This allowed research to make data-backed recommendations to the Product leadership regarding the prioritization of Monitoring and Reporting capabilities in the platform. Implementation is ongoing for Reporting Enhancement and plans to be launched in Q2 2025. With Design, Research was able to formulate designs that addressed pressing needs of performance by campaign, performance by targeting, and performance by KPI.