Customer Churn: 12 Ways to Stop Churn Immediately

Summary:

• When customers are unhappy, they stop doing business with you. It’s that simple. The more customers that leave, the less you grow. If you want to keep your customers, then you need to address customer churn. 
• Customer churn has a significant impact on your business as it lowers revenues and profits. Yet surprisingly, more than 2 out of 3 companies have no strategy for preventing customer churn.
• Here, I share a list of 12 practical strategies to help you focus on reducing customer churn and build relationships with your existing customers, so that you can keep happy and loyal.

Finding ways to reduce customer churn is a major headache for most companies.

How much of a headache, you ask? Well for starters, global marketers’ told CMO council that customer churn significantly impacts:

• Business performance through revenue loss (59%)
• Reduced profitability (39%)
• Greater marketing and re-acquisition costs (36%)

Based recent research, nearly 67% of surveyed respondents say they have no system for reactivating dormant or lost customers.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that there is not a single business in the world that has never lost a customer. And every business deals with this differently: some immediately start looking for new customers to replace the loss; others throw all their forces at analyzing what went wrong and how to put a lid on others trying to run away.

But before we dive into how to prevent it, let’s first start by clarifying what customer churn is.

What is customer churn?

Customer churn is calculated by the number of customers who leave your company during a given time period. In a more down-to-earth sense, churn rate shows how your business is doing with keeping customers by your side. But why does churn matter so much for businesses in the first place?

Well, the short answer is – because it costs too much to lose customers.

Let the numbers do the talking

When thinking of churn impact, the statistics by Forrester research comes to mind: it costs 5 times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep the existing ones. To make the matters even more serious, the Harvard Business School report claims that on average, a 5% increase in customer retention rates results in 25% – 95% increase of profits.

The same truths are revealed in a by KPMG, who found customer retention is the main driver of a company’s revenue.

Impressive, isn’t it?

But that’s not all.

According to Gartner, a staggering 80% of a company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of its existing customers. Meanwhile, Marketing Metrics claims that the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70%, and only 5-20% to a new prospect.

So, it makes perfect sense that focusing on reducing churn is paramount since keeping your customers is profitable!

Yet, not too many companies understand this and, as a result, still struggle in trying to reduce customer churn.

12 Ways to Reduce Customer Churn

But no need to panic, there are things that you can do right here and right now to combat customer churn.

I've created 12 ways to reduce customer churn to help you get started.

1. Analyze why churn occurs

Yes, this might be the obvious point, but let’s stress it once more: you have to simply find out why customers decided to leave. The easiest way to do this is to talk to the customer. And by “talk”, I mean really talk: getting your customers on the phone is the best option. This way you can demonstrate that you genuinely care, and would be able to find out what went wrong instantly.

Don’t go the lazy way by sending the customers exit surveys; just call them up and ask them why they left. This will provide you with immediate feedback on whether or not your product solves the customers’ problems or causes trouble to implement.

In fact, communicating with the customers does miracles in analyzing churn. And you need to be actively using all channels for that: phone, e-mail, website, and even social media. The valuable feedback on how well you serve your customers is just a phone call, an e-mail or a survey away. As simple as that.

2. Engage with your customers

The second thing that helps prevent churn is to engage your customers with your product.

Give your customers reasons to keep coming back by showing them the day-to-day value of using your products. In other words, you have to make yourself (your products, services, offers, etc.) a part of your customers’ daily work flow.

Engagement can be achieved through providing ample and clear content about the key functional benefits of your product and offering regular news updates, such as announcements of deals, special offers or sales you have coming up.

Even though the face-to-face communication remains the strongest customer engagement method, research from IBM found that there is a rise of website and social media channels that companies use to engage with their customers.

It is also a good idea to ask for continuous feedback. For example, ask your new customers what their first impression of using your product was. This will help you to better understand the initial impact that your products are making.

3. Educate the customer

This churn-prevention trick naturally flows from the point above. You have to provide enough good quality educational or support materials, which will help increase retention and reduce churn. Offer free trainings, webinars, video tutorials, and product demos – whatever it takes to make your customers feel comfortable and informed.

In other words, you have not only to give them the tools that work, but also offer the training on how to use these tools at a maximum profit. In this way you will demonstrate the full potential of your products and services, and ensure that customers are on board.

4. Know who is at risk

The best way to avoid churn is to prevent it from happening in the first place, right?

There is always a group of customers that is more likely to leave than others – so it’s in your best interests to know who is balancing on that dangerous edge. This way you can reach out to them in time to make them stay.

Spotting those who are getting closer to the ‘at-risk’ group is easy. Find out which customers were not contacted for a while. Or maybe they asked for something like a brochure, a quote or just more information, and you forgot to follow up on that? Knowing all this will help you become more proactive in preventing churn.

Also, after analyzing the reasons for churn, you become aware of certain actions, or maybe the lack of actions, that your churned customers made. This knowledge can help you foresee if someone, who is now behaving similarly, is likely to leave your company soon.

5. Define your most valuable customers

As sneaky as this might sound, you’d better separate the most valuable customers from the rest and go an extra mile to make sure that at least they are getting what they have signed up for. Tier your client base!

Why? Well, let’s be honest, these are the customers you want to keep mostly. Valuable customers have to be taken extra care of because they bring in the biggest revenue.

A history of your interaction with the customers can show how deeply they are involved at each stage, whether they had any problems with the product, and whether these issues were dealt with. Use tools like 1ike Salesforce and Hubspot CRM.

6. Offer incentives

Another advisable tip is to offer incentives, such as discounts and special offers, to those customers who were identified as likely to defect.

But! Beware that you have correctly evaluated whether offering incentives is beneficial for you. That means you have to be sure that the costs of your retention program do not outweigh the profits to be gained from the customers you intend to save.

Bottom line – you should not be wasting tons of money on customers who are not likely to bring you substantial revenue.

7. Target the right audience

No matter how sophisticated all of your retention tricks are, they may all go down the drain if you are attracting the wrong audience. What I mean here is – if your first interaction with the customer is about “free” and “cheap”, then you risk to attract the people who are not looking for the value you provide. These “freebies” collectors are the most likely to leave.

It’s better to target those who appreciate the long term value of products and see investing in good quality as an advantage. You’d better address those.

8. Give better service

You anticipated this tip earlier, didn’t you?

Yes, it is the most obvious method of keeping customers by your side. In fact, poor customer service is the leading case of customer churn. According to a Customer Experience Impact Report by Oracle, the two main reasons of why customers leave the company are incompetent and rude staff and unbearably slow service. Churn because of poor service stands at 70%, according to Forum Corporation’s research.

And we are not talking here about really bad service. Sometimes an average customer experience, or what can be called a “meh” experience, is a trigger for churn. You simply showed nothing to hook that customer on. So, make sure that you provide stellar customer service that makes customers, above all, happy.

9. Pay attention to complaints

Complaints are like tips of the icebergs – they suggest that the bigger part of the problem is hidden from your view. Did you know that 96% of unhappy customers don’t complain, and 91% of those will simply leave and never come back?

So, you’d better take complaints seriously and act on them, and in this way prevent customer churn, because, as Strauss & Seidel claims, dissatisfied customers whose complaints are attended to are more likely to remain loyal, and even become advocates, than other average customers.

10. Offer a long term contract

Next, how about extending your customers’ commitment? Instead of the month-to-month contracts, try offering a longer subscription model. In such a way your customer will have enough time to implement the product and see the benefits of using it. And once they see the benefits, they are more likely to commit to the product.

11. Make your best people deal with cancellations

To save a customer who is about to churn is certainly not a mission impossible. But you will have to call on your best sales skills to achieve good results in keeping them.

Find out who your best, most vocal and convincing sales reps are and give them the task to talk to those who decided to leave and prevent customer churn. You certainly can make use of their charisma and experience in dealing with difficult situations and dissatisfied customers.

Sometimes it only takes a good listener who is eager to walk in the customers’ shoes to change things around. According to the customer satisfaction survey conducted by Customer Service Group, the majority of respondents said that being heard and respected are more important than having their issue resolved.

12. Flaunt your competitive advantages

Finally, how different are you from your competitors? What makes you stand out? What will your customers lose if they decide to quit?

Answering these questions will help you define your competitive advantages and then flaunt them more. Competitive advantages are like honey that glues your customers to you. Analyze what it is that you do better or what makes you unique. Now think – do your customers know about it?

Conclusion

Now that we have established that you simply cannot afford to lose customers, it is better to focus on being a keeper. That means that your customers have to clearly see why it is better to keep you and stay with you instead of leaving.

And you’d better be proactive in how you prevent customer churn by creating the conditions in which customers would clearly see and make use of the benefits your products offer.

Keep in mind that 80% of a company’s future revenue comes from just 20% of its existing customers. You can’t deny that is a lot.

It is also worth remembering that the importance of customer service in keeping customers by your side can hardly be overestimated. According to Forum Corporation research, “Almost 70% of the identifiable reasons why customers left typical companies had nothing to do with the product. The prevailing reason for switching was poor quality of service.”

All in all, keeping your customers is not magic. It all boils down to analyzing the reasons behind churn and then acting on them. Communicate with customers and involve them with your products, improve your customer service levels and make sure they see what they are gaining if they stay with you, rather than stray away from you.

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A #SaaS Customer Success Manager. Experience with small, medium and enterprise-wide clientele.

Thanks for reading….Anyone know of any exciting and dynamic Customer Success #CSM Openings? I’m seeking a Customer Success #CSM Opportunity for Australia, New Zealand & Asia - based in Melbourne (remote also - work from home with travel) Please Message me, many kind thanks.

Customer Success Manager #CSM & Seeking to help #SaaS ? Companies Innovate & Succeed | #CX.

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