How to retain customers?

Making retention a management priority

In Germany, improving customer retention was identified as a major opportunity to protect the existing portfolio and strengthen sustainable growth.It is also an indicator for all other commercial aspects as pricing power and organic growth, so the saying is:

“If you get retention right, you get everything right!”

With a retention rate of around 70%, the challenge was to better anticipate potential churn and act early enough to secure contract renewals. Emeria Germany CEO therefore introduced a proactive retention approach involving the leadership team, branch leaders and operational experts. The objective was simple: identify at-risk contracts early, understand the underlying issues and systematically trigger corrective actions. The approach was built around three complementary pillars:

1. a comprehensive risk monitoring dashboard and
2. a clear governance
3. management commitment and involvement
4. remediation plan with clear follow ups

The first step was to create a comprehensive risk monitoring dashboard: a single, fact-based view of contracts and their level of risk. Emeria Germany developed a dashboard aggregating key contract data, including start and renewal dates, volume, price and effort required to deliver the services. Based on a defined set of criteria, each contract is assigned a risk score. The dashboard also identifies the main reasons for the risk, the amount of revenue potentially at stake and the remaining contract duration. This information is consolidated at both branch and contract level, allowing management teams to quickly identify the most exposed contracts and prioritize their efforts. Each identified risk is also associated with specific counteractions, ensuring that monitoring directly supports decision-making. The dashboard therefore acts as an early-warning system, enabling teams to shift from reacting to churn once it occurs to anticipating potential client losses before renewal.

The second step was to ensure clear governance and remediation that identified risks systematically translated into action. Retention is managed on a regular base by operational leaders and is reviewed quarterly with the local CEO, covering actual and potential churn, the highest-risk buildings and upcoming contract renewals. During these reviews, teams define counteractions for newly identified risks and follow up on actions already underway. Importantly, branch leaders are accountable for their at-risk buildings and the corresponding mitigation actions, creating clear ownership close to the client. Depending on the situation, several remediation levers can be activated: leadership escalation for critical cases, deployment of expert support to address specific operational or client issues, and financial incentives where appropriate. This governance creates a disciplined cycle: identify the risk, define the response, assign ownership and follow up until resolution.

These routine and management cycle was used to add other relevant topics like pricing, new business and cross selling. Pricing and new business are also reporting and dashboard based. So, there is a well-rounded perspective of all relevant aspects of our topline.

Time frame of the project was 6 month, main challenge was not the reporting, it was the retention mindset of the operational leader. The mindset created commitments to work on retention and the tracking on a regular base. Of course, all leaders were incentivized to push retention.

By combining early risk identification with clear accountability and systematic remediation, Emeria Germany increased its retention rate from 70% to 95%. The key lesson is the connection between data and execution. A dashboard creates transparency, but impact comes from turning insights into actions with clear owners and regular management follow-up. This German success story provides a strong best practice for POWER28: a concrete example of how Retain Focus can be translated into simple management routines that deliver measurable business impact.