Happy Friday! Here’s our picks for the best customer service, customer experience and mobile articles of the week, in no particular order.

5 Easy Ways to Improve Client Retention by Jayson DeMers

Every company needs to gain and retain customers to be successful, but gaining new customers is far more costly for your business. In fact, it costs 6-7 times more to attract a new customer than keep an existing one. So how can you make sure you keep customers around, the ones that will ultimately end up driving 80% of future revenue? According to AudienceBloom founder and CEO Jayson DeMers, one of the best ways to retain customers is to communicate constantly. Communicate about the good and the bad, but make sure you’re keeping in touch through it all.

5 Extremely Costly Customer Service Mistakes to Avoid by Akinde Hafiz

There are a variety of ways bad customer service can lose you a customer—the agent wasn’t able to help with their problem, the issue was never resolved, one (or both) parties lost their temper, etc. But scenarios like this can be avoided, if you know what to avoid. One of the customer service mistakes you should avoid is using incompetent personnel, according to customer relations manager Akinde Hafiz. You can avoid this by making sure staff are properly trained and have the soft and hard skills needed to provide great customer service.

Customer Experience Boggle Busters for Channel Silos by Lynn Hunsaker

At OneReach, we’ve long talked about the benefits of omnichannel—customers are seamlessly transferred across channels without losing track of where they were in the conversation. And customers want to have omnichannel experiences—research from Zendesk has found that 87% of customers thinks brands could do a better job of providing seamless experiences. In her CustomerThink article, CX expert Lynn Hunsaker explains that in order to provide a consistent experience, companies need to collaborate across departments. This is essential when adding a new operations, sales, marketing or service channel.

What Eating Chocolate Can Teach You About Customer Service And Building A Great Customer Experience by Micah Solomon

Customer service typically involves just two parties: the company and the customer. Occasionally another agent will get involved if a problem gets escalated or another person who works with the customer will jump on the call, but for the most part it’s a one-on-one experience. But what if involving multiple parties in an interaction improved the experience? As customer service expert Micah Solomon explains, it can: “When your business facilitates connection between your customer and the people your customer cares most about, you’re providing a powerful and long-lasting reason for that customer to keep doing business with you.”

To learn from the experts on the best way to improve customer service, download our report here.