Understanding Customer Churn and How to Fight It

Customer churn is and will always be a critical metric for product success — sometimes it can even be a nightmare!

Let’s try to understand its complexities, and to provide some actionable insights for product managers to effectively mitigate it.

What is Customer Churn?

Simply put, customer churn is the rate at which customers stop doing business with us. It is really that simple, but it is also much more than a metric: it reflects the health of our product and services. High churn rates usually point to significant problems with user experience, product-market fit, or customer satisfaction (include pricing in the list). It’s fundamental to understand the root causes of churn: is it technical issues, lack of features, poor customer support, weak customer experience, laborious user journeys, pricing, or something else? Data are once again key in our search for an answer: analyzing churn through data-driven insights can reveal patterns and provide a roadmap for improvement.

Customer Feedback is key

Understanding customer feedback is key to addressing churn. Collect and analyze feedback frequenatly and constantly to extract invaluable insights into customer needs and pain points. It is not just quantitative data like, for example, usage statistics, but also, and as importantly, qualitative feedback through surveys, interviews, user testing sessions. Never underestimate the importance of qualitative feedback: as product leaders, we must support a culture where every piece of feedback is seen and interpreted as a great opportunity for improvement.

Product Development

Reducing churn is intimately and deeply linked with strategic product development. Prioritise features and improvements that deliver against customer expectations and needs — don’t waste time on anything else! Mind you: it’s not just adding more features (this could sometimes be a waste of resources); it’s also, and sometimes even more importantly, about enhanching user experience and satisfaction through product enhancements, minor or major as they might be. Rigid product roadmaps are always the enemy, and in this case even more so: roadmaps should be flexible enough to allow for rapid changes based on customer feedback, market trends, competitive analysis or strategic considerations.

Customer Experience Improvement

A great, rewarding and delightful customer experience is fundamental to fight churn. But mid you: it goes well beyond the product itself and it extends to all the touchpoints a customer has with the company (it’s not just the product, remember). It’s imperative to create seamless, engaging, delightful and value-driven user journeys. Continuous updates, great customer service, fast and efficient onboarding can positively impact churn.

As product people our mission goes well beyond managing products, and it extends to creating and developing long-lasting, value driven and delightful customer relationships.

Reducing churn is not a finite, one-off project: it is a continuous, never-ending process of questioning, researching, learning, adapting, and improving that requires a holistic approach involving product development, user experience, customer feedback, user research, and stretches to finance too (balanced usage of resources available and proper prioritization of initiatives). It’s an art supported and informed by science, data and experience. This is what makes product management so interesting and rewarding.