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Case Study in Retention

Case Study in Customer Retention

By using Call for Wine’s Outbound Hospitality services, an early customer is able to not only maintain sales and retain club members, but double the average club member lifecycle despite going through a six month tasting room renovation and closure.

The Challenge

This particular winery client was one of our first customers. Like many in the industry, they were missing a valuable opportunity to build incremental sales by not maintaining a complete and centralized customer database. Customer information took many shapes and forms: from tasting room receipts to shipping invoices. To further complicate matters, the tasting room was scheduled for a six month renovation project and the winery was concerned about maintaining customer relationships during the upcoming period of closure.

The Call for Wine Solution

1. As a test, our sales reps began calling a selection of names found on paper shipping forms. We found that we were able to generate additional sales from these calls, but that the process was tedious, unorganized, and certainly not optimal for building long-term customer relationships and retention.
2. We used those initial calls, and resulting incremental sales, as our cue to quickly transfer all paper information to our centralized CRM solution. This would allow us to gain a full picture of each customer's purchase habits and preferences.
3. We then followed our standard procedure of calling each and every customer, organizing them into interested, active, invalid, and Do Not Call categories.
4. Wherever possible, we updated old and invalid data with new phone or email information, adding names to our active database as we went along.
5. From there, we established a call schedule for all active customers with the intent of touching base two to three times per year with specials, announcements, and event invitations.
6. Because of the impending closure of the tasting room we paid special attention to Wine Club members, providing “club only” offers and other exclusive membership benefits. Our goal was to remain “top of mind” with these important customers despite the fact that the tasting room was closed for business.

The Results

After only 20 months of calling the database:

1. We increased the average club member lifecycle to 36 months, double the industry average of 18 months.
2. A full 49% of phone sales were attributed to non-wine club members, a formerly untapped resource for this winery.

While the tasting room was not accessible to the public for six months and the winery couldn’t rely on a retail presence to drive customer awareness, we maintained sales with consistent and compelling calls. Once the new tasting room opened, we promoted it via scheduled calls, especially to those we knew hadn’t visited the winery in a year or more.