How to Reduce Customer Churn?

If your customers are unhappy, they will stop doing business with you. There can be many reasons why your customers leave and opt for your competitors. It can be because they’re not getting proper customer support, product is not upto their expectation level, and many more. This is known as Customer Churn.

Customers are the driving force and play a crucial role in making any business a success. If you want to retain your customers, then you need to make efforts to reduce Churn. Plus, keeping a check on your churn rates will help you understand what’s happening in your business and how happy your customers are with your products and services.

Esteban Kolsky, CEO of ThinkJar and former Gartner analyst found that, Customer Churn can be reduced by 67% if companies succeed in resolving customer issues during their first interaction.

No matter how much you satisfy your customers, some amount of Churn is unavoidable. But does that mean you should give up and stop making efforts to reduce Customer Churn? Obviously, No.

So, how to deal with this issue? You can create different strategies and follow them to see which one works for your business. For instance, you can form the best customer support teams to analyze what went wrong and ensure that your existing customers should not leave you and stick with you forever.

Why it’s important to prevent Customer Churn?

No business wants its customers should leave. Why? One, it can have a huge negative impact on your revenue. Second, it costs a lot more to acquire a customer than retain an existing one. Moreover, if you retain more customers then your business is going to make more revenue.

Customer Churn is a key performance indicator that helps you measure customer engagement and brand loyalty. This is why it’s essential for every business to create an effective strategy to combat the issue of customer churn.

7 Ways to Reduce Customer Churn

What’s the primary goal of every business? To achieve 0% customer churn. It’s difficult to achieve, but implementing the best ways can help you reduce the churn rates to a great extent.

1. Analyze the reasons behind Churn

You can’t eliminate Churn till the time you are not aware of its root cause. And what’s the best way to find out? Take out some time and interact with your customers. It’s the first step in the diagnosis process. Listen to their side of the story and understand their concerns. Although there’re different ways to communicate with your customers, some of them are:

Sending a Customer Satisfaction Survey on frequent intervals
Making a phone call and having one-on-one communication
Sending a personalized follow-up email

Make every possible effort to reach out to your customers that will make them feel that you care about their opinion and help you earn their loyalty. Studies show that 48% of consumers ditched a company’s website and bought the item somewhere else because of a poor experience.

2. Engage with your Customers

How often do you get in touch with your customers? At the time of renewal of the subscription? Or when they cancel the subscription? Do you think it’s the right approach? Ofcourse no, as all this can lead to negative customer experience.

Everyone loves to feel special, and your customers are no different. Find different ways to engage with your existing customers and show them the value of your products and services, so that they keep coming back to you. You can tell them what’re the benefits of using your products and services? How they’re different from their competitors? You can even share the latest updates about the newly added product features or any special offers.

Apart from that, you also need to keep track of all customer interactions across all channels, devices, and touchpoints in a customer journey. It’s also crucial to share the right type of content at the right time with your audience. According to a report published by Marketo, Email Marketing is one of the most efficient customer engagement channels for B2B businesses to connect with their customers, offering numerous benefits of email marketing such as targeted communication, personalized messaging, measurable results, and cost-effectiveness.

3. Improve the Onboarding Process

What’s the one thing that’ll remain in the minds of your customers forever? It’s how you treat them. Do you know that after signing up for a SaaS product trial, only 40-60% of users will use the product once and never again? It could be because they might not be fully aware of how to make use of your products or services.

As per the research done by Glassdoor, a strong Employee Onboarding Process can improve employee retention by 82% and improve productivity by over 70%

The best solution is to educate your customers via Training, Webinars, Product Demos, Video Tutorials, Knowledge Base, Guides, FAQ section, etc. It helps you enhance your onboarding process.

4. Collect Customer Feedback

It’s important to determine whether your customers are happy or unhappy with you. Why? Because unhappy customers often lead to Customer Churn. But how would you know? You can collect their valuable Customer Feedback via conducting surveys. It will help you understand how your customers perceive your products and services. As per PWC, 63% of customers are more open to share their data for a product or service they say they truly valued.

Another way to interact with your customers and gain real-time insights is via Live Chat. You can integrate a live chat app within your website, monitor every interaction, and address the pain-points that are stopping your customers from doing business with you.

If you want to know the root causes behind customer dissatisfaction, then you need to gather Customer Insights, analyze them, and take appropriate actions to fix the issues that can enhance the overall customer experience.

5. Pay Attention to Customer Complaints

How would you feel if the customer support team doesn’t listen to your problems and take no proper action to resolve them? You would feel frustrated. Isn’t it? As a business, you need to make your customers a priority. Esteban Kolsky conducted a customer experience survey and found that 1 in 26 customers make a complaint when they are unhappy, rest will churn without saying a word.

A complaint can consist of issues related to the products and services, processes, and the support team. How to deal with them? You need to build a platform where your customers can log their complaints, assign the issues to dedicated customer reps that can identify the reasons behind them, and take corrective measures to rectify them.

If you create a positive experience for your customers, then the probability is high that they’re going to complain less and recommend your products and services to their friends and family.

6. Improve Your Customer Support Service

What do your modern-day customers expect from you? Instant and great customer support. It can improve your Customer Satisfaction scores and improve churn rate.

The two main reasons why customers leave any company are – Incompetent and rude staff and extremely slow service.

Providing poor customer support will make your customers abandon you. Moreover, unhappy customers will try to hamper your brand image by leaving negative reviews on numerous online forum sites. This is why it’s essential for you to provide quality support services.

Let’s learn how Zendesk created a strategy to combat this issue. They formed a Customer Account Management (CAM) team, who was responsible for maintaining a close relationship with each customer and periodically keeping a check on them to resolve their issues. Performing this activity helped them increase loyalty among their customers and able to earn more referrals.

7. Analyze Churn when it happens

What’s the common mistake that most businesses commit? Wait for their customers to churn and then form a strategy. It will not help you to retain them.

Instead, the best methodology is to create a strategy first and put in place that can reduce the churn rate. You need to analyze at what intervals your customers are most churning. Is it after 30,60, or 90 days after using your products and services? Try to figure out the churning patterns and trends.

It can play a vital role in forecasting the Churn well in advance. For instance, for a SaaS-based product company, if a subscriber uses your product and suddenly stops using it for 2 months, then it’s an indication of Customer Churn. In such scenario, you can offer them a free product upgrade to keep them stick to your business.

Final Words

Customer Churn can be bad for any business only if you don’t track, measure, and take concrete actions to reduce it. If you don’t want your customers to opt for your competitors, then you need to perform a comprehensive analysis of their requirements and determine the roadblocks. You can also try to implement all the ways that I’ve discussed in this blog, so that your valuable customers stay with you for the long-term instead of leaving you.