What is Customer Retention? Strategies & Tools to Get Started

Customer retention is priceless. When you have loyal customers, you have a consistent flow of revenue. They become your brand advocates over time and start bringing you more customers, eventually increasing your revenue significantly.  

In fact, research conducted by Harvard Business Review proves that you can boost your profits by up to 95% if your customer retention increases by 5%. 

Now, that’s quite a significant return. 

To achieve this level of return, you need to develop and implement strategies that boost customer retention. But good strategies alone cannot produce the desired result of keeping customers coming back to you. 

If you want to build a pool of returning customers, start investing in customer retention tools that make the implementation of those strategies a breeze. 

In this article, we uncover the top customer retention tools that you can use to serve customers better and make them fall in love with your brand. 

Woorise is the easiest way to create lead generation landing pages, forms, quizzes, surveys, viral giveaways and popups to help you grow your business from a single platform. Explore templates

What is customer retention?

Customer retention is the process of encouraging your clients to re-purchase your service or product. This can be achieved through a set of customer retention strategies or programs.

Customer retention is critical to survive the fluctuating and evolving business landscape. Besides increasing your business revenue, it positions you as a trustworthy brand that customers love to be associated with. 

Your customer retention rate speaks volumes about your brand values and how you treat your customers. Here are some of the major benefits that customer retention provides: 

Word of mouth publicity absolutely free

Yes, you heard it right. Customers can be your brand advocates or critics. The choice is yours. If you treat them right, they stay loyal to your brand and don’t hesitate to share the positive experiences with their social networks. People trust the real-time experiences of those in their network more than the claims made in advertisements. 

That explains how customer retention increases your brand’s popularity that too free of cost. 

Cost-saving

Invest in nurturing your relationships with customers and providing them the best-in-class services, and you will not have to spend exorbitantly on marketing or advertising. 

Besides, it also reduces the efforts that go into onboarding new customers. Your existing clients are already familiar with your offerings and how you function, so you don’t have to put that extra effort into serving them. That’s not the case with new customers, as they need proper guidance every step of the way while interacting with your brand. 

Improves Your Revenue Graph

Loyal customers will buy more often from your brand. First, because they are familiar with your quality standards and service criteria. Second, because they trust that you will not wrong them. Therefore, buying from your brand gets much easier for them than switching to your competitor. 

This leads to returning customers and more revenue for your business.

Besides, loyal customers will be ready to pay more for your products and services simply because they value your brand and trust that you work for their best interests. 

Valuable Feedback 

Loyal customers know your products and services in an out. Since they are associated with your company for a long time, they can give you valuable suggestions that new customers can’t. 

They know details like – 

• Bottlenecks faced while using your product
• How your customer service team operates
• What important features are missing in your product, and much more. 

Customer retention gives you the opportunity to gain valuable feedback and suggestions. Implementing these can bring significant improvements in the way you serve your customers. This leads to happier customers and much better sales, as well. 

10 Customer retention strategies

These strategies can help your business boost its customer retention rate and manage its customers on autopilot. If you’re wondering how to increase your brand’s customer loyalty, you’re in the right place!

1. Create A Single Source Of Truth For Your Customers

How often do you find yourself going back and forth with a customer? Emails, phone calls, Google calendar invites – keeping in touch with customers can be a tricky process, no matter what service you’re providing.

When Booking.com chose to say goodbye to its digital ad agency in favor of hiring an in-house team, one of the main reasons they cited was “speed.” Contacting their agency was a slow process, making it difficult for the brand to change their marketing strategy at short notice.

The average worker will receive a staggering 121 emails, and send 40, every single day. Not only has this email overload been linked to employees feeling distracted and frustrated. It also makes it much harder to refer back to past conversations. This process becomes even more complicated if you have to keep track of lots of documentation and paperwork at the same time.

According to the Harvard Business Review, it can take more than 20 minutes for a worker to get back on track after being interrupted by an email. By making the transition to automatic reminders, you’ll be able to increase efficiency for both your customers’ business and your own – creating a professional experience that makes the process pain-free for your customers.

2. Install An Automatic Communication Calendar

Remember that 60-80% of your customers won’t return to you for business even if you satisfied them initially? The truth is you that can’t rely on happy customers to come back for more. Instead, your company will have to be proactive and approach them. But keeping track of hundreds – or even thousands – of customers can be a tricky task.

One of the best ways to do this is by setting up an automatic communication calendar. This is a chart or spreadsheet which manages your customer engagements and keeps track of your communication. It’s basically a visual representation of your communication strategy, helping your brand plan when and how you’re going to send content out to your customers.

If you haven’t already set one up, there are hundreds of free templates online that can be easily customized to reflect your company’s schedule. (Alternatively, you can simply use Google Calendar).

Although it might take you a while to input your schedule and preferences, the finished communication calendar will save you huge amounts of time and effort in the long-run. Tailoring your content to your customers is key to an effective customer retention strategy, especially when tracking KPIs for customer satisfaction to measure what’s working.. Let’s explore how an automatic communication calendar can help you to achieve this.

When Should You Send Communications?

Pretend that one of your customers is coming to the end of a free trial for your product or service. This is a critical moment which will determine whether or not your customer decides to make a purchase from your brand.

Within your communication calendar, you can set up automatic reminders for ‘road marks’ in your customer journey – such as the end of free trials, or six months from their last purchase. This will help you send out tailored content at strategic moments, without having to monitor each customer individually.

Keep your communications personal rather than promotional to show that you value their service. (‘Hi Jane! Three months on, we wondered how you’re getting on with our product?’). Language that centers around their experience – and isn’t pushy about making another sale – will create a lasting dynamic.

Your customer acquisition strategy might be bold, but when it comes to customer retention, it’s thoughtful details that will win repeat sales.

3. Use RSS To Send Regular Newsletters & Automated Emails

Email marketing is one of the most valuable tools in any brand’s arsenal. Did you know that 99% of consumers check their emails every day, and over 50% check more than 10 times a day? By far, it’s most people’s preferred way to hear from brands. It’s also incredibly cost-effective. So how can your business harness the power of email newsletters to boost customer retention whilst running on autopilot? The answer is with RSS.

RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. It’s a standardized method of distributing content, from podcasts to blog posts, in any easy-to-read fashion. Using a tool called an RSS reader, anyone can access your RSS feed and view all the content you’ve published – not just the most recent or most popular pieces.

By using a process known as ‘RSS to Email’, you can send content from your RSS feed directly to subscribers. This function is now offered by most major email service providers, and is an excellent way of automating your email marketing and newsletters.

How To Create RSS To Email

• The first step is to decide how often you want to send your emails. (Research differs on the best frequency and times of day to send communications, so it might take some trial and error before you work out the optimum strategy for your company). Typically, this will depend on how often you publish new content.
• In the dashboard of your chosen service provider, navigate to the RSS-to-email function. This might be located within a dedicated email marketing section.
• Insert the link to your company’s RSS feed. Now you can select the frequency with which you want to send your emails. This could be every time you publish a new RSS item, or on a daily / weekly / monthly basis.
• Add in your desired message subject and recipients. Make sure the text of your email includes a clear section on how to unsubscribe, otherwise your emails won’t be compliant with GDPR.
• Select the template and formatting for your newsletter.

By setting up an automatic RSS to Email function, you can remind existing customers about your business without having to send newsletters manually. This process will automate every aspect of your emails, leaving you free to focus on other things.

4. Ask Your Customers For Customer Feedback

As we mentioned earlier on in this blog post, one of the main benefits of customer retention is the fact that loyal customers are more likely to give feedback. Not only are they more familiar with your offering than new customers, they’re also more emotionally invested in your company.

Although lots of companies ask prospective customers for feedback – for example, by integrating surveys into their website – existing customers are far less likely to expect something in return for their time.

There are various ways to ask your customers for their customer feedback, but the main thing to consider is your timing. It’s best to ask for feedback before your customer has stopped thinking about the sale (unless you specifically want to find out how they feel about your product or service six or twelve months on).

Adding a pop-up survey to an ‘order confirmation’ page is an effective strategy if you want to ask questions about your product range, for example, or the usability of your website. Although your findings will inevitably be biased (after all, you won’t be hearing the views of anyone who was so unimpressed by your brand that they clicked off the page!), it could give you valuable insight into your customer demographic.

Likewise, try asking for feedback at the end of a phone call with a customer, or include a brief customer satisfaction survey when you send out contracts.

5. Listen to Your Audience

First of all, you need to listen to your audience if you want to improve customer retention. Being a good listener is vital for any business owner who wants to develop a brand image that will be the most appealing to their customers. Consequently, this kind of brand image will help you improve your customer retention quite a lot.

Most of the time, people love talking. They love expressing their opinions about everything and anything even when they weren’t asked about it. However, there are not as many people who love listening to others talk. These people are rare which is why being a good listener is such an underrated quality often overlooked pretty much by everyone.

But clever business owners and marketers have figured out this skill and now actively use it to improve their customer retention, establish a better connection with their audience, and develop strong long-term relationships with their customers. If you are ready to change your mindset and start listening to your audience, then there are a few things you should know:

• There are different ways for you to listen to your audience. It’s not just about talking to them when they call customer support and ask you about how to use your latest products. It’s also about creating regular customer surveys, replying to their reviews online, engaging with them on social media, and so on.
• You need to use different channels to listen to your audience. You will also need to use different channels to listen to your audience. For example, email marketing can be used for surveys while social media can be used for polls and more casual interactions. Just remember that different segments of your audience will be using different channels for communication.
• You need to respond to what your audience is saying. You have listened to them and now you know what you want to reply or do in response. Are they unhappy with your delivery options? Change that aspect of your business to satisfy them. Do they want a wider range of products in your store? Consider adding more items.

6. Create Irresistible Offers

The second thing you need to do is start creating irresistible offers to improve your customer retention. The only reason your existing customers will want to become long-term returning clients is that they see potential in your business and genuinely enjoy your brand and the products or services you have to offer them.

To create irresistible offers, you need to know what you are selling and what your customers are most interested in. Is it the body lotion you launched last week? Or is it the hand cream kit you have been selling for three years now? You will only be able to create irresistible offers once you know these kinds of details.

Keep in mind that you will be the one writing the text for these offers, so you need to make sure that you truly understand what you are talking about. For example, you decide to put together a makeup kit and attach a discount to it on the condition that the customer also purchases another product of yours.

The first thing you will need to ask yourself then is, “Is this makeup kit appealing to my audience?” Then, you need to consider whether the discount is good enough and whether that additional product is interesting for the customers buying the makeup kit. After that, you will need to learn every detail about all the products you will be describing before getting to work.

Much like with listening to your audience, you can then use different channels to promote these special offers but remember to focus on your social media.

Instagram, for example, allows you to add product prices right onto your posts. Take a picture of your newly made makeup kit and the additional product you want your customers to buy in order to get a discount for the kit. Then, publish the photo while tagging the products in the post. This way, you will create a truly irresistible offer for your potential clients.

7. Reward Those Who Promote Your Brand

There are several different types of customers. First, there are the customers that only buy once from you and never come back even if you try to attract their attention again. Second, there are the customers who stick with you and make multiple purchases again and again. Third, there are customers who can be either the first or the second type, but what sets them apart is that they start actively promoting your brand.

For example, someone buys that new makeup kit of yours. They try it – and oh wow, it’s truly amazing! So, naturally, they decide to share their experience online by publishing their review on their blog or social media. The next thing you know is their readers and followers get interested in your brand and decide to purchase the makeup kit as well.

This is an example of pretty much a regular customer accidentally giving you extra exposure by posting good feedback about your products online. Then, by word of mouth, you will be getting more exposure and increasing brand awareness. But what if this person doesn’t buy anything from you once they have made that single purchase in the beginning?

That’s when you should use rewards. You need to value such customers who are willing to share their positive experiences and promote your brand because they are the ones who will be doing free marketing for you. But if they like your products so much, why don’t they buy them again? Maybe it’s because they didn’t get a response from you to their feedback.

Even commenting on their post or sharing it on your own social media account can be a great way to show that you care. You could offer discounts, gifts, and exclusive offers to those who have given you a shoutout. This will get them thinking about making another purchase in your online store. Because, why not?

8. Focus on Personalization

Personalization is probably one of the most important aspects of any marketing campaign. If you don’t personalize your content, most of your customers will probably perceive your brand as inferior to others like you, especially your competitors who do use personalization as the basis of their marketing strategy.

The thing is that personalization is not a cute gimmick – it’s a standard. People expect you to filter your content and provide them with only the best bits, customize your website design to improve customer experience, and so on. Consequently, if you don’t do this or even don’t try to do this, you will be missing out on a lot.

As mentioned earlier, customers tend to stick with the brands that they genuinely like. This is why you need to think about a way to make your brand more likable and interesting as well as your content more engaging. Here are just some tactics you might want to consider:

• Use professionals to do their jobs. You may be a great writer and maybe even know a bit about editing photographs, but the only people who can really make your content stand out are professionals who know their jobs better than you. Hire a writer from a writing service, find a great freelance photographer, and so on.
• Improve your website design. Your social media marketing can be perfect, but your website is the place where the sales happen. This is why you need to make sure that your website design is the best that it can be. This includes both the way it looks and the way it works.
• Find a way to make your social media profiles unique. Your social media profiles are the face of your brand – and this face has to stand out of the crowd. Make sure you use a certain voice and style when writing your content. At the same time, you should also use a particular editing technique for your visuals to show your signature style.

9. Speak with Your Audience in Their Language

Speaking of having a certain voice and style in your text, you need to find the language your audience speaks in. This does not only mean choosing English, Spanish, and French, for example, to publish your content in. This also means that you have the right accents in all the right places (e.g. using coke instead of soda, using jargon or terminology, etc.)

Yet, even if you decide to use casual words, you need to remember that you represent a brand and you need to remain as professional as possible. Don’t become aggressive when talking to your social media followers and choose your phrasing wisely. Here are some tips on how you can find the language your audience speaks in:

• Read what your followers are writing. Check out their social media profiles and especially the reviews they post to see if they know your industry-specific terms or they prefer using everyday words instead (e.g. they refer to separate components of your hand creams rather than simply talking about your hand cream).
• Check out your competitors. Perhaps the best way to figure out what your niche is like is by getting to know your competition. These are the brands you are competing with who have pretty much the same goals as you. If you notice a particularly effective method they use, you would probably want to try it out yourself too.
• Conduct a survey of your audience. Do they only want content in English, or do they want it in French and Spanish too? If you sell products worldwide, using multiple languages is probably your best bet.

10. Use Influencer Marketing

Last but not least, you can use influencer marketing to improve your customer retention. At its core, influencer marketing is about finding important people in your community who have a significant online follower base and can promote your products. Here are the most important things to remember when getting started with influencer marketing:

• Having a set of guidelines is crucial. When you get in touch with an influencer who can promote your brand, you will need to provide them with a set of guidelines for what you expect them to create. For example, you will probably want them to use certain hashtags or a particular way of phrasing the promotion.
• Doing extensive research can tell you a lot. Before you decide to get in touch with influencers, you need to do extensive research and find out as much as you can about them. These people will be representing your brand by promoting you, so you need to make sure that they are good people who have a good reputation and can act responsibly.
• Setting achievable goals is a must. Lastly, you need to set certain goals for your influencer marketing campaign. What exactly are you trying to achieve with it? Do you want to improve brand awareness, or do you want to increase sales? Or maybe both? Customer retention will depend on how loyal the followers of those influencers are and how well they promote your brand. If these followers become your customers and like your products, there will be more chances that they will stick with your brand.

Top 10 customer retention tools

Retaining customers can be challenging. However, with customer retention tools below, you can create excellent experiences for your customers and build genuine relationships with them that last a lifetime. 

1. Woorise

If customer engagement is on your mind, Woorise is the right choice.  

Woorise is an excellent tool for running contests, giveaways, surveys, and quizzes. Whether your goal is to generate new leads, grow a subscriber list, or boost your social media following, this tool offers you interesting features that simplify the whole process. 

Some of its key features include:

• Pre-made layouts and templates to create customized campaigns
• Drag and drop campaign and form builder
• Pre-built social actions such as viral share, follow buttons, social widgets, etc. 
• Conditional actions and confirmations
• Custom CSS and various other design options
• Mobile-friendly
• GDPR-compliant

Price: starts at €29. 

2. ProProfs Knowledge Base

When it comes to providing effective and instant customer service, there can be nothing better than a self-help knowledge base. 

Customers are increasingly becoming impatient. When they experience a challenge, 40% of them prefer finding solutions on their own without approaching the support staff for help. 

ProProfs Knowledge Base software helps you meet this expectation.

Simple yet powerful, the tool comprises smart features, settings, and integrations to help you build a self-help knowledge base, documentation, help site, manuals, and more. 

Leverage the tool to create a centralized knowledge platform that customers can access conveniently to find answers to any questions they have regarding your products or services. Your support staff can also use this platform to find information while responding to customers on call or email. 

The software assists you in various ways. Some of these are: 

• Provide 24*7 instant self-help to customers across different devices and browsers
• Craft pleasant experiences for customers by integrating the software with third-party tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Wufoo, and more. 
• Provide a seamless information-gathering experience to customers through a Google-like search system
• Gather customer feedback through surveys
• Identify knowledge gaps through metrics such as popular and poorly rated articles, the total number of searches failed searches, etc. 

Key features:

• 25+ ready to use templates
• 90+ language support
• Rich text editor
• Powerful integrations with third-party tools
• Insightful reports
• Branding and customization options
• Roles and permissions
• Google-like search system
• Conditional content rules
• Context-sensitive help
• Revision history and version control

Price: starts at $0. 

3. Zonka Feedback

If customer retention is your priority, Zonka Feedback is a smart choice.

Zonka Feedback is an AI-powered Customer Feedback & Intelligence Platform that helps you understand why customers stay, churn, or become loyal advocates. It brings together multi-channel feedback through email, SMS, WhatsApp, in-app, website widgets, and offline touchpoints, then uses AI to analyze sentiments, themes, intent, and urgencies so you can take action instantly. Its real-time dashboards, response inbox, and automated workflows make it easy to close the loop quickly and improve long-term retention.

Some of its key features include:

• Omnichannel surveys for NPS, CSAT, CES and product or experience feedback
• AI-driven sentiment, themes, emotion, urgency, and entity analysis
• Response inbox with case management to resolve issues faster
• Automated alerts, notifications, and follow-ups
• Dynamic segmentation and targeted survey triggers
• Web and in-app widgets for continuous product and journey feedback
• 50+ integrations including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Intercom
• GDPR-compliant and fully customizable

Price: pricing available on request.

4. Yotpo

Yotpo is another powerful customer retention tool. It helps you collect customer reviews, showcase customer-related content strategically on your website, and drive more conversations. It also allows you to create referral programs and provide customized rewards for existing as well as new customers. 

You can even use photos and videos of your existing customers to place on your website. This is a wonderful strategy, especially if your objective is to engage your prospects and drive them to purchase from you. 

Here are some of its main features:

• Multiple campaign choices
• Custom designed experience
• Tier-based programs
• Track customer actions and behavior
• Multi-channel support
• Flexible reward structure
• Measurable ROI
• Multiple sharing options

Price: starts at $0. 

5. Qualaroo

To retain customers, you must understand them. Customers go through a period of dissatisfaction before they quit doing business with a company. Understanding the issues that they are unhappy with could be just what you need to make them stay. 

Qualaroo can help you do this easily. The tool is adept at launching surveys on your website to collect and analyze customer feedback. It enables you to target specific users, track visitors in real-time, and nudge visitors at the right time, without interrupting their browsing experience. 

The tool’s AI-powered sentiment analysis system is competent in tracking mood metrics and keywords, helping you analyze customer feedback in a better way. 

Key features: 

• Beautifully designed survey templates to get started
• Sentiment analysis powered by IBM Watson
• Exit surveys to identify reasons behind lack of conversions
• Branching and skip logic
• Customizable nudges
• User experience insights

Price – starts at $199/month. 

6. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing tool to keep customers coming back to your business. The tool is perfect for connecting with prospects through customizable emails, creating landing pages that help in conversion, and developing digital ads to get new customers. 

Whichever industry you belong to – ecommerce, retail, hospitality, or startup, Mailchimp can help you in your growth journey. The tool also offers powerful integrations with Zapier, Slack, Canva, and WordPress to make your experiences extremely pleasant. 

Key features: 

• Email analytics
• Pre-designed email templates
• Identify what’s working and what’s not in the campaigns
• Pre-built segments based on campaign activity, purchase history, and more
• Pop-up signup forms to gather contact details of prospects
• Mailing address finder 
• Launch surveys and send targeted messages based on survey responses
• Detailed revenue reports
• Share emails on social media

Price: starts at $0. 

7. Chargify

Customer retention is about giving customers pleasant experiences throughout the purchase and post-purchase phase. Billing and payment are important touchpoints in a customer’s purchase journey. They are integral to the purchase process and play a significant role in keeping customers closer to your brand. 

To retain customers, you need to provide them with a frictionless billing system that builds trust and improves your relationship with them. 

If you are looking for a tool that can help you achieve this, look no further than Chargify. 

This client retention tool is ideal for managing online payments and dealing with revenue management challenges. It provides pricing combinations, automates your quote-to-cash process, manages subscriptions, offers over 20 payment gateway options, and much more. 

Key features: 

• Events-based billing
• Elastic billing
• Analytics and predictive insights to give you a deeper understanding of revenue flow
• Automated billing logic
• Customizable sign-up pages
• Subscription modifications
• Two-factor authentication
• User access controls

Price: starts at $149/month for startups

8. Heap Analytics

Heap Analytics is an amazing tool for understanding customers, making smart business decisions, and providing excellent experiences to your customers. It gives you an end-to-end understanding of how customers use your product and helps you identify the features users love and the ones they don’t. 

This client retention tool tracks every click, tap, or swipe your customers make while interacting with your product on your website or mobile app. Not just this, Heap Analytics also help you improve customers’ journey by providing them personalized experiences at every stage. 

Key features:

• User segmentation based on past behavior and attributes
• Role-based project access
• Event previews and event history
• World-class security system
• Product analytics
• Run experiments, test new features, and identify bottlenecks

Price: starts at $0. 

9. Litmus

If emails form a significant part of your strategy for retaining customers, you need to ensure that your customers are opening and acting on those emails. 

Litmus is the right tool to achieve this. It allows you to create emails that convert and improve returns from your email marketing campaigns. You can use Litmus to increase your email marketing effectiveness and keep customers coming back for more. 

Key features:

• Email previews to know how your emails look like on different apps and devices
• Verify links and evaluate subject lines
• Track clicks and discover trends
• Identify broken links and test spam filters
• Reusable templates and task lists
• Meaningful email insights
• Custom task list and status updates
• Multi-channel collaboration

Price: starts at $99/month. 

10. Buffer Reply

With many customers now opting to use social media platforms to express their dissatisfaction with companies and share experiences with their networks, this can spell doom for your brand. The best way to avert this disaster is to track customer complaints on social media. 

A social media monitoring tool, Buffer Reply, enables you to do this on Twitter. The tool tracks customer complaints on Twitter and pushes them to your company so you can respond faster. It brings tweets about your company in a centralized tweet box, where you can respond, archive, and monitor conversations easily. 

Key features:

• Double-reply prevention
• Team signatures
• Tag conversations for followups
• Custom search queries
• Assign conversations

Price: starts at $15/month. 

11. Gainsight

It’s a fact that the more your customers succeed in using your product or service, the more they are likely to come back for more.

Gainsight’s customer success tool is the ideal choice to keep tabs on how customers experience your products. It enables you to increase customer retention and improve customer success at every stage of their interaction with your brand. 

Managing customers gets seamless with data-driven alerts and productivity tools offered by this software. It’s a powerful tool to supercharge your customer service team, gather useful customer insights, and bring success to your customers.

Key features:

• 360-degree customer profiles
• Customer health scorecards
• Engagement analytics
• Scenario workflow automation
• Call-to-action notifications
• Visual reports and dashboards

Price – Available on request

Conclusion

Retaining customers isn’t just about increasing sales; it’s about building meaningful relationships that fuel long-term success. Loyal customers bring more than revenue—they bring trust, advocacy, and feedback that help shape your business. By focusing on keeping your customers happy and engaged, you set the foundation for sustainable growth and a brand people truly connect with.

The tools and strategies we’ve shared make it easier than ever to nurture those relationships. Whether you’re using Woorise to create engaging campaigns, Mailchimp to stay connected through emails, or Gainsight to ensure customer success, these tools empower you to deliver great experiences consistently. They help you meet your customers where they are, build trust, and keep them coming back.

At the end of the day, customer retention is about showing your customers that they matter. It’s about going the extra mile to meet their needs and making every interaction count. By combining smart strategies with the right tools, you can create a brand that your customers not only stick with but genuinely love to recommend.