Following the Umbrella Model for Customer Retention

Have you made any major purchases online recently? Where did you start? Probably with a quick Google search – oh look, 1 million results to sift through. You start scrolling down, review sites pop up, retailers, industry news. You click on a video review, and in it is a link to the amazon page, but wait now you have to sign up for an Amazon account. You go to pay – sign up for PayPal. It’s finally all ordered, better check the UPS tracking link in your email that you have to sign into. And now once it’s finally arrived the manual is missing and one of the parts is broken, better search up the manufacturer site and wait three weeks for them to respond to your email. Sound familiar?

Customer retention comes from a pleasant customer experience, which means not bouncing leads around like a sadistic pinball machine through the jungle of your purchasing procedure. The Umbrella Model for customer retention prioritizes a homogeneous experience, put everything under one system. Karl Erik Gustafsson attributes the origination of the term ‘Umbrella Model’ to Stanford Economics Professor James N Rosse, and applied infrequently in Scandinavia to refer to the hierarchical order of the local and regional newspapers, where local news fell under the umbrella of the bigger organizations. Jason Sprenger expanded the term to public relations, detailing the importance of containing all elements of an organizations PR effort under one system - keeping your audience under your umbrella. I use the term Umbrella Model to refer to the practice of general consolidation of software services and procedures in the online and offline aspects of your business.

The Umbrella starts with single sign on, even better if sign on is enforced as late into the process as possible. You want to retain customers, not bounce them elsewhere for information. Getting a lead to provide any kind of information about themselves is a huge privilege you have to earn, throw them a bone first and entice them to stay.

One way to win over customer loyalty is to put them in contact with a real person – and no, some text popup with ‘Talk to Chad!’ on your site does not count as a real person, I mean video and audio human contact. Remember, homogeneity is the key – we want that call to be on the website and feel as integrated as possible with the rest of the system.

When it comes to payment, have you considered online pay, through electronic financing? Think of it like integrated PayPal for your dealership, and all under one umbrella. Single sign on keeps your customer happy and engaged, and most importantly, retained.

After sales services are where many dealerships fall short in maintaining the dealer-buyer bond. If the effort is not made to reinforce the customer’s value to the dealership to form some sort of bond, there are dozens of equally competent service providers your customers will find with a simple google search.

What are you doing to keep your CX on top of your customers? Considering the Umbrella Model when implementing software solutions will improve the purchasing experience, and will reflect in the retention of a much happier client base. There’s no need to buy a chat service, and a document sharing service, and a video call service. Providers like uShare.to enable digital connections on all customer channels, and integrate into your existing online system. Keep it all in one, under one umbrella, and everyone will walk away happy (and stay out of the rain).

Sources

https://www.bulldogreporter.com/redefining-and-rethinking-pr-introducing-the-umbrella-model-of-public-relations/

http://www.nordicom.gu.se/sites/default/files/kapitel-pdf/41_KEG.pdf