Across the supply chain, many organizations have found it difficult to properly identify their most loyal customers due to multiple layers of different vendors, retailers, distributors and manufacturers. However, when businesses do identify these loyal customers, they need a way to maintain loyalty. Maintaining loyalty is a critical part of a customer retention strategy.  

Businesses using rebates are in a lucky spot: they have a customer retention tool baked right into their core business strategy. That’s right: rebates are a great retention strategy.  

But using rebates as a customer retention strategy can be challenging without the right tools to influence buying behavior while maintaining margins.  

Let's dive into how rebate management software can increase customer retention.

1. Strengthen Collaboration with Your Customers

Once you have gained a customer, it might be tempting to sit back and let the customer make the next move, but staying alert and thinking ahead is essential to improving customer retention. Being proactive and reaching out to your customer will lead to better customer engagement and customer happiness. Listening to customer feedback and putting it to good use will also lead to higher satisfaction.

Rebate management software with built-in collaboration features allows you to organize your customers in a single location to keep track of agreements, their progress and their interactions with your business. By opening up collaboration and having an easy way to remind them about your deals, you can improve customer retention and keep customers that you may lose otherwise.

2. Offer a Variety of Rebate Programs

Rebates are great tools for keeping customers coming back for more. Loyalty improves customer retention and encourages repeat business, which in turn helps companies generate revenue and achieve overall growth. Some rebate programs help trading partners move additional stock or promote certain product lines while other programs are designed to protect margins and increase earnings.

Manufacturers use a variety of rebate programs to bolster loyalty from buying groups or distributors who purchase from them. The more volume a distributor or buying group purchases, the more they might earn in rebates, securing loyalty from that trading partner. Distributors offer rebates in a similar capacity when selling to retailers.  

The great thing about rebate management software is that it's built specifically to manage rebates, whether simple or complex. You have the ability to set up a wide variety of deals and invite your customers to collaborate on them to reach their thresholds.  

Read our White Paper: Understanding Which Incentive Type is Right for Your Business

3. Build a Standardized Rebate Process

With rebate management software in place, you can build structure around your rebate programs and give customers a chance to maximize the value of each agreement. If you have all your data in one place, you have everything you need to review your efforts and figure out what program is working best and where things need improving. This means uncovering inefficiencies and achieving successful outcomes to increase customer retention becomes much easier.

4. Measure and Report Effectively

25% of distributors report not knowing how they measure their rebate goals. Meanwhile, 46% of manufacturers believe that better awareness of their trading program from their trading partner would improve the effectiveness of their rebate program. This tells us that customers and suppliers have an opportunity to work together by using rebate management software that increases visibility into rebate programs while simultaneously providing more reporting capabilities. This in turn improves customer retention.

Read our White Paper: The Importance of Measuring Your Rebate Programs

5. Calculating Rebates Owed or Due Accurately and On Time

There are two sides to calculating your rebate programs:

• If you’re a supplier, you calculate how much you owe your customers and tell them what you’re paying them in rebates.  
• If you’re a customer, you likely rely on your suppliers or buying group to tell you how much you’re making in rebates. However, 57% of distributors in buying groups don’t know the rebate amount earned from each manufacturer.

If you’re not using rebate management software, chances are you and your customers aren’t calculating the numbers quite right. And chances are, that’s led to a dispute or discrepancies which can ultimately damage customer retention.

This is not the best way to do business. You both want your numbers to be accurate—and the same. This means using rebate management software that allows both sides to manage all their trading agreements and rebates in a single location.

Improving Your Customer Retention Rate Starts with Enable

Rebate management software can massively improve your customer retention rate, especially if you select software like Enable with numerous advanced features to foster relationships for you and your customers. Among these features are tools to help you measure and track your rebates, hold deal information, sign off agreements and gather detailed reports to inform your future rebate strategies. See for yourself: https://enable.com/schedule-demo